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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



\ 



A Summer in England 



WITH 

HENRY WARD BEECHER: 

Giving the Addresses, Lectures, and Sermons delivered 
by him in Great Britain during the Summer 

OF 1886. 



together with an account of the tour, expressions of 
public opinion, etc. edited by 

JAMES B. POND. 



5BHtti) f ijotojjrapfju: portrait of JHr. Bwtijfr. 




NEW YORK: 
FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT. 

1887. 






COPYRIGHT, IN 1887, 

By j, b. pond. 



r 

OS 



To My Beloved Brother, 

O^ias to. flonb, 

MY COMPANION ON MANY A LONG JOURNEY WITH MR. BEECHES. 
AND MY ASSOCIATE IN BUSINESS, 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. 

J. B. P. 



PREFACE. 



It was my expectation to issue this volume very soon 
after our return from England. 

I had intended it to be not so much a publication as 
a souvenir for Mr. and Mrs. Beecher's friends and my 
own. But there were unexpected delays; my health 
was not good, and business preoccupations and disap- 
pointments laid heavy taxes upon my time. Besides 
these, Mr. Beecher entrusted some business of his own 
into my hands which demanded my close attention. I 
greatly desired to see him complete his " Life of Jesus, 
the Christ," and he was much disposed to do this, the 
more so as publishers had made overtures for his auto- 
biography; one house even asking permission to send him 
a check for twenty thousand dollars if he would only 
promise to begin the work this summer. He confessed 
to me that no task would give him so much delight as 
the writing of his own remembrances; but he felt that he 
had neither the right nor the conscience to attempt any 
other literary work while the Life of Christ remained 
unfinished; he felt that there were moral obligations to 
the subscribers of the first volume and to his own work 
in the world which only the completion of that book 
could fulfil. He asked me to find, if I could, a publisher 
to undertake both works. I did so, and perfected both 



iv PREFACE. 

contracts with Messrs. C. L. Webster & Co. By their 
terms Mr. Beecher was to complete the Life of Christ 
by the 1st of July, and the autobiography eighteen 
months later. With the contracts I delivered to Mr. 
Beecher the publishers' check for five thousand dollars 
as an advance on the two works. 

Other business of Mr. Beecher's took me to Washing- 
ton City in March; I was there on Saturday, the 5th, 
when I was shocked by the receipt of a telegram from 
Colonel H. B. Beecher in these words: 

" Father very ill. Apoplexy. Suffering no pain." 

I hurried to Brooklyn, reaching there the next morn- 
ing, Sunday. I found my beloved and revered friend 
paralyzed and unconscious. Around his bed were two 
of his sons, Col. Henry B. and Mr. Wm. C. Beecher, 
and his daughter, Mrs. Scoville; while in her own room 
adjoining the sick-chamber sat Mrs. Beecher. It is not 
for me to attempt a description of the scene or the pas- 
sage of time around that bedside, the sad waiting, and 
the solemn end. 

Mr. Beecher was my nearest and dearest friend for 
thirteen years. Excepting only Arizona and New Mexi- 
co, there was not a State or Territory in the Union in 
which we had not travelled together. In sunshine and 
in storm; by night, by day, by every conceivable mode 
of travel; on steamboats androwboats; by stage, and on 
the backs of mules, I had journeyed at his side. I was 
near him in the days of 1876-^8, the time of his deepest 
sorrow, when he was reviled and spit upon; I saw the 
majestic courage with which he passed through gaping 
crowds at railroad stations, and at the entrances of ho- 
tels and public halls, — a courage which I had not con- 
ceived mere humanity could possess. I have looked 



PKEFACE. v 

upon him when I felt I would give my poor life a thou- 
sand times could that sacrifice alleviate the mental suf- 
ferings that I knew he was undergoing. There were 
times when it seemed as though he must give way, times 
when I was the only friend within his reach, and he 
sought refuge near and with me. It was thus that he 
came to love and trust me, and that my love and venera- 
tion for him became so strong that to lose him now 
leaves me like a ship without a helm or a commander. 

Especially during those three darkest years was he 
the subject of my sad admiration. Often have I seen 
him on our entering a strange town hooted at by the 
swarming crowd, and greeted with indecent salutations. 
On such occasions he would pass on, seemingly un- 
moved, to his hotel, and remain there until the hour 
for his public appearance; then, confronted by great 
throngs, he would lift up his voice, always for humanity 
and godliness. He always saw and seized his opportu- 
nity to speak to the whole great People ; and when he 
had spoken, the assemblages would linger to draw near 
to and greet the man whom they had so lately despised. 
How changed I have often seen the public attitude to- 
ward him when he left a town into which he had come 
but the day before ! Thus he went from city to city, 
making friends and advocates of all who heard or met 
him; and thus for the thirteen years was it my delight to 
accompany him in his work of re-establishing himself in 
that love and confidence of the people from which un- 
principled enemies and an often merciless press had at- 
tempted to thrust him out forever. When it came my 
turn to be in deep trouble, he was my only comforter. 

I thank God that it was my privilege to attend his 
fortunes to the end, and to see and hear on both sides of 



v i PREFACE. 

the Continent, and on both sides of the ocean, demon- 
strations of love and confidence that came at length in 
so unsullied and vast a stream, from the Church, his 
friends, his country, and his race, toward him who had 
brought so many thousands of them so much nearer 
than they had been to the common Master of us all. 

James B. Po^d. 



CONTENTS. 



The contents of this volume are divided into four 
separate parts : Introductory matter and Account of the 
Trip, 125 pages; Addresses, 160 pages; Lectures, 118 
pages; Sermons and Prayers, 298 pages: or, 701 pages 
altogether. The Parts are paged (having been arranged 
for separate issue) each by itself. 

PAGE 

Account op the Trip, by J. B. Pond 5 to 125 

Addresses : 

Eeception by Americans in London 3 

Reception in Glasgow 11 

London Congregational Board 22 

Caterham Congregational School 56 

Theological Students, City Temple, London 72 

Freedman's Aid Society 112 

Congregational Board at Liverpool 129 

Reception in Belfast 150 

Lectures : 

The Reign of the Common People 1 

The Wastes and Burdens of Society 25 

Conscience 61 

Evolution and Religion 91 

Sermons and Prayers: 

« 

The Essence of Religion 3 

Christian Self-Denial 17 

Unity of Christians by the Power of Love 33 



4 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Nicodemus and the Re-Birth 49 

The Fruits of the Spirit 60 

Divine Compassion 81 

Liberty by Bondage 101 

War against God and His Kingdom 117 

True Preaching 131 

The Genius of Christianity , 147 

The Atmosphere of a Christian Life 161 

Paul's Idea of the Cross 177 

Needless Care and Anxiety 191 

Heroism and Suffering ; . . 204 

The Doctrine of Repentance 219 

The Divine Abundance 237 

The Mystery of Suffering 251 

Prayers 267 to 298 

ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Photo-a/rtotype Portrait of Mr. Beecher Frontispiece 

Fac Simile, Seven pages of Notes for his Address to Theo- 
logical Students, City Temple, London 72 



A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 



WITH 



HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



CHAPTER I. 

VOYAGE, AKD WELCOME TO E^GLAKD. 

The following record was almost ready for the book- 
binder, with the exception only of these prefatory pages, 
when the great man of whom it tells, apparently in the 
fullest enjoyment of health, was suddenly stricken by 
death. It was not my original intention, but is my 
severe disappointment, that this should have to be of- 
fered as a tribute to the memory of the departed, which 
was intended for his friends in the enjoyment of his 
presence and his pastoral charge. 

In the summer of 1876 I made a tour of England, 
Scotland, and Ireland with the Eev. T. DeWitt Talmage. 
At that time I took pains to inquire as to Mr. Beecher's 
probable reception should he decide to visit England. 
I found on all sides a sort of hesitancy: his strongest 
friends advised against his coming; there seemed to be 
an almost universal prejudice against him. Dining one 
evening with a gentleman in presence of a large com- 
pany, including several members of his own house- 



6 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

hold, I happened to quote Mr. Beecher. The gentleman 
replied, "I do not allow that name mentioned in my 
family." It is now my pleasure to tell of a visit to Eng- 
land by Mr. Beecher and his wife, at the close of which 
that very gentleman (who entertained them at his house 
in London) and members of his family offered welcoming 
congratulations, parting words, good wishes, and bless- 
ings to Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, whose portraits now hang 
in places of honor in the house where once his name was 
not allowed to be mentioned. 

In 1876, I say, I could nowhere get encouragement to 
bring him to England. The secular press was against 
him ; there was no kind word for him from the re- 
ligious press, excepting only the Christian World. 
Only here and there an old acquaintance, or a reading 
minister, expressed any sentiment towards him that, it 
seems to me, deserved to be called Christian. But these 
things only fixed my resolve to show the English public 
how mistaken they were. It became my constant pur- 
pose to get him upon British soil and have his voice 
heard among Englishmen. I never afterwards lost any 
fair opportunity to present to him the necessity of 
accomplishing this end; but when I talked with the 
most influential members of his church, even his deacons 
and assistant pastor gave me no encouragement. The 
best word said was, " If he goes, he must not lecture; he 
must only preach." There was no belief that the Eng- 
lish public would give him a cordial hearing. 

As to Mr. Beecher, he always said, "You need not 
talk England to me; I will not do it. I shall not go; or 
if I do, I will not speak in public." Still my determi- 
nation only grew. I urged every friend of his whom I 
knew to suggest the desirability of his being heard again 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. V 

in England, and at length I began to see that such 
words were having their effect. 

"Deacon H. thinks I ought to go to England and 
preach; but if I do, I shall never lecture there." This 
was his casual remark, I replying, " Did you ever lecture 
without benefiting the public? How many times have 
you met great audiences of sceptical opponents and 
curiosity-mongers in America to see them, after hearing 
you, leave the hall your sincere and devoted friends? I 
want you to be heard all over England for the good it 
will do. I want the world to know why you are so 
beloved by all who know and hear you; and nothing will 
teach that like your presence." 

This kind of persuasion went on from year to year, 
and it was only in the winter of 1885-6, during a short 
tour among our Western cities, that he began to speak 
favorably of going abroad; and by and by I made him a 
large business offer to lecture in England five days each 
week, leaving him Saturdays for rest and Sundays for 
preaching. I believed and said it would be the crowning 
year of his life. He did not say ISTo, and my hopes grew 
strong. It had taken me three years of frequent per- 
suasion to get his consent to make his first iour to 
California, and his second through the Western States. 
I had to use the same methods to bring about his 
" Circuit of the Continent" in 1883. 

I had already written letters to England to his friends 
and mine; and I now got answers that assured me that 
the people were now ready and anxious to hear him. 
The steady power of his life, his great influence always 
used for good, the constant publication over there of his 
sermons, had gradually gained and secured him a large 
and widening circle of friends. These letters gave him 



8 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

great satisfaction, and the project gained favor among 
his nearest friends. These now became my helpers both 
in Plymouth Church and in the community where he 
lived. It began to be rumored in Brooklyn and New 
York that the journey would be made, and the public 
response was, as one put it, " He will do us honor over 
there." 

One morning in May, 1886, when I visited him at his 
lovely home in Peekskill and went so far as to show him 
advertisements of steamships, he made inquiries, and 
bade me ask the advice of a certain near friend and 
church officer upon the choice of a steamer. Finally 
the steamer was selected, and at last I was made happy 
by Mr. Beecher saying, " Well, Pond, go ahead ; we will 
take the Etruria." 

The following Sunday he announced his purpose in 
his church, and on the succeeding Sabbath hundreds 
tried in vain to gain admission to the crowded church : 
the pew-holders and their friends came early in the 
morning and filled the place. It was almost impossible 
to persuade the great crowd outside to disperse. The 
church was decorated with flowers in unusual abundance. 
Every feature of the service, the music, the sermon, and 
the evident feeling of the audience, rose to the impres- 
sive character of a farewell worship. At its close Mr. 
Beecher was surrounded by scores of friends, all eager to 
express their love and affection, and to offer any service 
they might. 

We were to sail on Saturday morning, June 19th. At 
the prayer-meeting on Friday evening hundreds failed 
to get into the lecture-room. Mr. Beecher was asked to 
go into the large auditorium. "No," he said, "this is 
our prayer-meeting room, where we have met on Friday 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 9 

evenings for forty years, and I do not feel like making 
this evening an exception." 

A great overflow of church-members and friends filled 
the auditorium adjoining the lecture-room, waiting to 
say Good-by after the prayer-meeting. Here until 
eleven o'clock Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were detained, 
saying Good-by, and receiving God-speed; children 
clinging to Mr. Beecher, and he kissing them and 
saying some precious word to each. Then Mr. and Mrs. 
Beecher went home, to gain a short sleep and to be on 
board the Etruria at six o'clock the next morning; 
while the Trustees remained in the church for a few 
moments later, to order officially an advance to Mr. 
Beecher of six months' pay, and to grant a leave of 
absence until such time as he might choose to return. 

Promptly at six o'clock the Etruria left her wharf. 
Her decks were crowded with passengers not yet aware of 
Mr. Beecher's presence ; but as he stood almost alone on 
the forecastle deck, leaning on the rail, his well-known 
form attracted the attention of the people on the ferry- 
boats, and simultaneously the whistles of the tug-boats 
and other neighboring steam-craft were sounded in 
salute. 

Three thousand Plymouth Church people had risen 
before the sun to pay a farewell tribute to Mr. and Mrs. 
Beecher; and as the Etruria steamed down New York 
harbor, the excursion-steamer Grand Republic, with 
this great throng on board, followed close behind. Just 
before the Etruria reached Liberty Island her engines 
were stopped, and the Grand Republic came alongside, 
her three thousand passengers crowding to the nearer 
guards and sending up cheer after cheer. Mr. Beecher 
stood where he could overlook the heads of those around 



10 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

him, and, resting one hand upon his wife's shoulder, 
lifted his hat and stood uncovered and bowing, while 
Mrs. Beecher waved her handkerchief in return to the 
innumerable salutations of her friends. Dodworth's 
band played " Hail to the Chief/' and the whistles of 
the steamers saluted; then, as the Grand Republic 
sheered off and these sounds were hushed, the receding 
voices of Plymouth Church choir were heard across the 
water singing, " Praise God, from whom all blessings 
flow." Mr. Beecher stood uncovered until the last 
sound died away. 

We passed Sandy Hook at 10.30 o'clock, and were 
soon out at sea, bound for England. Now we had our 
first opportunity to look about us on the ship. We 
found baskets, bouquets, and banks of flowers. Mr. 
and Mrs. Beecher's cabins were beautifully decorated. 
Many friends had sent letters of farewell; and one had 
provided a basket of twenty homing pigeons, with in- 
structions how to send messages, what birds to fly first, 
and what others at two and three o'clock. Mr. Beecher 
wrote messages to his sons, and to friends in various 
parts of the country, fastened them to the birds accord- 
ing to directions, took the birds in his hands, playfully 
gave them parting instructions, and then let them fly. 
They reached their destination safely, as in due time 
we learned. 

The day was beautiful. There were five hundred and 
sixty-three names on the passenger-list, and every one 
seemed well and happy. The following day, however, 
was rough; the ship tossed heavily. Mr. Beecher was 
sea-sick, and continued so for four days. But the 24th 
of June was his seventy-third birthday; the sea was 
smooth, the sun bright, and the weather perfect, and 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 11 

he appeared on deck. I had been intrusted with birth- 
day cards and letters from friends, and these were now 
presented. His mind was diverted from the sea to 
pleasing thoughts of home and friends, and for the rest 
of the voyage he enjoyed every hour. 

On Saturday morning, 26th, at daybreak, we awoke 
off the Irish coast. There was a heavy fog. The fog- 
whistle was making a horrid din. We could hear 
voices in the distance, noises of life and commerce. 
Soon the fog lifted and we saw land. At six o'clock we 
reached Queenstown. Here many of our passengers 
disembarked; and here, with the Dublin morning papers, 
we got letters and telegrams, and numberless invitations 
for Mr. Beecher to dine, and to speak on the Home Rule 
question. We saw that Mr. Gladstone was announced 
to speak at Liverpool, and decided to remain and hear 
him. We received letters from Dr. and Mrs. J. W. 
Parker, Dr. Henry Allon, and a host of others of Mr. 
Beecher's clerical friends, inviting him to preach, and 
scores of applications, from all parts of the Kingdom, 
for lectures. As we drew near Liverpool, the deck of. 
our steamer presented the usual closing scenes, of 
throngs in changed apparel, merriment and happiness. 

We landed at 7.30 in the evening, and were met by 
delegations from Bradford, Leeds, York, Carnarvon, 
Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin, and other 
cities. Reporters from the London papers were also in 
waiting. So — I was on English soil, with Henry Ward 
Beecher ! My fondest dream was realized. 

We spent Sunday, the 27th, in Liverpool. Mr. 
Beecher had several invitations to preach, but was 
obliged to decline all, since he had* not regained the 
vigor lost in his sea-sickness. He found his way to some 



12 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

church alone, and sat in a large congregation unrecog- 
nized for the first time since he was ordained a minis- 
ter. In the afternoon many clergymen and many men 
active in politics called to pay their respects. 

The next day we heard Mr. Gladstone. He spoke at 
Hengler's Circus to an immense audience. "We had the 
fortune to obtain a ticket for Mr. Beecher to the plat- 
form, and one each for Mrs. Beecher and myself, in the 
auditorium. 

After squeezing and twisting our way through the 
crowd for half an hour, we finally got a place for Mrs. 
Beecher to sit, and I stood in the packed aisle for an 
hour before proceedings began. Yet all was orderly; 
only once was there any excitement. Mr. Beecher 
found it necessary to cross the platform in sight of the 
audience while they were waiting. He was recognized. 
The vast crowd cheered and applauded to the echo, and 
refused to be quiet until Mr. Beecher acknowledged the 
attention. He heard Gladstone for the first time, and 
at his best, as was generally conceded by those ac- 
customed to hearing him. We rode back to our hotel. 
I asked Mr. Beecher how he liked it. 

" It was a very powerful and very luminous speech," 
he replied. " Here is a man fagged out with the cam- 
paign, with his voice nearly scotched; if he can make 
such a speech under such circumstances, what would 
it be were he fresh and elastic ? Of course, I was 
thinking all the time how it would affect the British 
public. To us Americans it is a stupendous argument 
in favor of Home Eule, which is as simple as the alpha- 
bet to our part of the world. Home Eule is the key- 
note to the whole American system. The British Gov- 
ernment is a suppressed democracy. If all men in 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 13 

England were as free to vote as in our own land, this 
question would be very easily settled." 

We remained for the night at the Northwestern Ho- 
tel in Liverpool, where Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were 
made very comfortable in the Eoyal suite, amid flowers 
and special decorations. 

On Tuesday morning, June 29th, our party all left 
Liverpool at 9.40 in a special saloon car for London, 
where we arrived at 2.15. Eev. Dr. and Mrs. Parker 
met Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at the station, and took them 
to their residence at Daleham Gardens, a beautiful mod- 
ern English home in the northwestern part of London, 
the fragrance of whose flowers and the brilliant hue of 
whose foliage were extremely attractive. The dinner, 
which was in waiting on Mrs. Parker's table, and the 
welcome which accompanied it would forever banish 
home-sickness. Only in English homes can the fulness 
of welcome to strangers be realized. 

Remaining in London from June 29th to July 4th, 
Mr. Beecher was enabled to take a thorough rest : yet he 
was active; he called on me almost daily with letters 
that had come applying for lectures. 

"I was never made for rest," he has frequently said 
to me. 

Arrangements were made for him to preach for his 
friend, Dr. Parker, on Sunday, July 4th. This was to 
be his first public appearance in London. It was not, 
however. On July 1st Dr. Parker preached his usual 
Thursday-morning sermon in his church, the City 
Temple. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were in attendance. 
The Temple was crowded; I think it was understood 
that he was to have a day undisturbed, but Dr. Parker 
was too full of English welcome, and, Mr. Beecher sit- 



14 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

ting in the audience, he could not resist mentioning the 
fact, but called him to the pulpit and said to his con- 
gregation: 

"We have with us this morning the Kev. Henry Ward 
Beecher. If I were introducing any clergyman from a great 
distance, I should have to explain a good deal about him in 
order to bring you into sympathy with the occasion. In this 
instance, however, the name is its own introduction. [Loud 
applause.] 

" That is a very good cheer to begin with, but it would never 
do for a finish. I should not care to belong to any church 
where the congregation could not laugh and cry according 
to conviction and impulse. Let there be no restraint this 
morning. If you love Mr. Beecher and welcome him, say 
so ! [Loud and long-continued applause, the congregation 
standing.] 

"Mr. Beecher has kindly undertaken to do three things in 
this church at present. [Laughter.] What he may do in the 
future, I dare not say; but I am living in the sweet content- 
ment of present blessings. Mr. Beecher has engaged to close 
the service this morning with prayer. Secondly, he has en- 
gaged to preach in this church next Thursday morning at 
twelve o'clock, and, not to keep us waiting too long, he has 
promised to preach in this church on Sunday morning next. 
[Loud applause.] This is just like him. If he ever did an 
ungenerous thing, I never heard of it. Some people have 
thought that sometimes he was just on the verge of doing an 
unusual thing, an imprudent thing, but never has any man 
accused him, in my hearing or to my knowledge, of ungener- 
ousness. He gives and works with both hands earnestly and 
diligently. This comes to my mind as what one might term 
an extemporaneous suggestion, namely, that Mr. Beecher, 
accustomed to republican institutions, should for the nonce 
submit himself to our monarchical usages, and if I might avail 
myself of the tyranny which is supposed to attach to imperial 
government, I should venture, in tones that cannot be too 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 15 

restrained and dulcet, to suggest that he should not only con- 
clude the service with prayer, but should say something to us. 
[Loud applause.] That is, if anything should occur to his 
dull and infertile imagination. Who can tell what may occur 
to him ? In the inscrutable ways of Providence, some ideas 
may dawn upon him. [Laughter.] We shall presently see. 
My brethren, in your name, as well as in my own, shall I ex- 
tend to Mr. Beecher an English Christian welcome? [Loud 
applause.] 

" There is in London what is called, very appropriately, 'an 
American Exchange.' [Laughter.] I can never forget the 
kindness I received in the United States. I can never forget 
the day when I had the honor and pleasure of preaching in 
Plymouth Church. Then I never dreamed that Mr. Beecher 
would be with me as he is to-day. But he is here. And Mrs. 
Beecher is here. [Loud applause.] And never was my poor 
little pill-box of a home-house turned so upside down as it has 
been since their arrival. What with telegrams and reporters 
and letters and suppliants, and people offering to give Mr. 
Beecher receptions, my quietude has been utterly spoiled. We 
are Americanizing our institutions; in a day or two we may 
get accustomed to it. It is like taking a voyage over the sea. 
The first day or two is apt to be a little uncertain — not to put 
too fine a point on it. [Laughter.] But this is an honor which 
we value. We welcome a servant of God; we welcome one of 
the principal prophets of the Church. We have read his ser- 
mons and his prayers for many a long year. He grows 
younger with the years. My brethren, I am sorry to break in 
upon a man's singularity, so that the palm may, even for a 
moment, seem to be divided between two. I am, however, 
constrained to violate the sanctity of a definite personality, 
and to say that last week there was in England a Grand Old 
Man — [Loud applause] ; — to-day there are two of them. " [Loud 
and long-continued applause.] 

Mr. Beecher was received with great cheering. He 
said: 



16 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

' ' An old Methodist minister of my acquaintance, in preach- 
ing a revival sermon, commented upon the difficulty of win- 
ning the amiable and the kind, and he illustrated it by saying: 
' We can easily cut the grain that leans away from us, but the 
sickle slips over the grain that leans towards us.' I could 
have faced an oppugnant audience, and spread my sails to 
the wind of opposition easily; but so much kindness disarms 
me. When I heard my honored brother preaching, I said to 
myself, ' He is a lion.' But when I saw him practising these 
seductive arts, I said, ' He is a fox.' [Much laughter.] 

"I represent this morning, I think, somewhat, that most 
useful instrument of bands, the drum; I am very empty, and 
therefore just qualified to make a good deal of noise. I have 
but very little that I can say to you. Kind reference has been 
made to clouds that overhung the years of the past; they have 
gone down below the horizon and are forgotten. Contrary to 
my expectations, I have come again to the land of my fa- 
thers. From the county of Kent sprang my line, with a dash 
of blood from Wales. I must confess I am one of those in 
whom sentiment has predominant power ; and while I go into 
cathedrals, both here and on the Continent, with profound 
sensibility, I also profess, when I step on the shores of my 
fathers' land, to have coming to me all the sensations that a 
son should have for his father and for his ancestors. I will 
not undertake to be the laudator of England, but this I can 
say : Through light and through dark, through good and 
through evil, she has proved herself to be the right hand of 
Almighty God for light, for liberty, and for victory. [Ap- 
plause.] And if we have unfolded on our continent institu- 
tions which might well be copied, with modifications, at the 
old home, it is because we have so much room to build larger: 
the architect was England; we have but enlarged the patterns 
given us, and built as she would have built if she had had an 
island big enough, and if she had not been encumbered with 
various and commixtured institutions that must be removed 
before the foundations of the new and more glorious future 
shall be laid. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 17 

' ' And in coming to England, I recognize with profound grati- 
tude how much I, as well as every other truth-speaking man 
that loves God and his fellow-men, owe to the religious litera- 
ture of England. The very men whom I could never follow 
have followed me all the days of my life, and that which I 
could not take from them as food I have received from them 
sometimes as chastisement. [Laughter.] It is a good thing for 
one to be chastised in this world in various ways, as my brother 
here can testify ; for as marble is but a rude and rough block 
until the chisel has cut away all the encumbrances that hide 
the true portraiture within it, so a man that is unchiselled is a 
rude stone yet, and the man that has been very much chiselled 
is apt to be an Apollo or an Apollyon, as the case might be. 
[Laughter.] England ! I love her churches, but above all I 
love those in whose face shines the glory of God as it is in 
Christ Jesus. You are not strangers to me ; you are my 
blood-kindred, and it is the blood of Christ. You are my 
brothers, my fathers, my mothers, my sisters, my children. 
With all my heart, I say, I thank you for the expression of your 
confidence, and yet more for your love. I shall be glad ac- 
cording to the measure of my strength to serve my brother 
and you, but more than all to serve Him whom I love above 
father or mother or brother or sister ; who loved me and re- 
deemed me by his precious blood. And in him let us unite 
in some words of prayer : 

" Dear Lord, we come to thee again; not as the needy, for 
we are not needy, we are fuller than we can carry. Thy 
mercies overflow our cup; it drops down with perpetual over- 
filling. We come to thee because, when the heart is full and 
we do not know what to think nor what to do, in the bosom of 
thy love we find rest. Grant that the love which we have 
for thee may be purified by suffering, by striving, by endur- 
ance, by growing knowledge, that all other knowledge may 
rise up and shine in the lustre and light of thy love. And as 
God is love, and they who love are of God, O, blessed God, 
look upon those that love thee and are of thee, and that re- 
joice through thee and will rejoice, through death, that they 
2 



18 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

are the children of God because they are the children of love. 
Give to every heart that which it needs, and keep from every 
one that which it asks and needs not. Go into every sanc- 
tuary of the soul, unseen and sacred from men, and bless 
them there ; go into every household and abide with them 
there; break the bread to every household, and open thy 
hand, and say, ' Peace be with you.' 

" Bless thy dear servant. Already blessed, may his blos- 
soms be yet fresher, and the fruit more abundant and sweeter. 
Abide in his household; abide with this congregation; abide 
with us all. Be pleased to remember thy servant the Queen 
of this Empire, and endue her with long life and with more 
and more benign influence, that she may, an exemplar of 
purity, lead on the way to higher and higher glorious civil- 
ization. Kemember those that are to be joined with her 
in authority, that the light of a divine wisdom may shine 
upon their path ; and in all the honest strife and struggle of 
men for that which they think best, be pleased, Lord, to 
divide between thought and thought, and purpose and pur- 
pose, and lead out the right thing. May the glory of the 
Lord stand over this great nation for a thousand years, and 
again for a thousand years. Lord, hear us, love us, take care 
of us, for thine own name's sake. Amen." 



Many of the vast congregation lingered to give the 
hand of welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Beecher. There 
were many Americans, and not a few members of Ply- 
month Church. American feeling ran high, and it 
was indeed to me a realization of my long desires. 

I am permitted to give here some extracts from a letter 
written by Mr. Beecher at this time to friends at home, 
which will give his impressions of matters thus far. Of 
course it was written without the faintest idea of pub- 
licity ; and it shows how sincerely he was gratified by 
his reception: 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 19 

" London, July 2, 1886. 

"My dear Friend: We reached Queenstown Saturday morn- 
ing, Liverpool Saturday evening before sundown, though it 
was ten o'clock before we landed, and by eleven we were safely 
lodged in the Northwestern Hotel, where we spent Sunday, 
resting. We waited over Monday that we might hear Glad- 
stone speak. All England is aflame over the Irish Question. 
It is said that the excitement is greater than has ever been 
known. Gladstone's speech was said to have been the best 
that he has made during this campaign, and it was admirable, 
and the popular enthusiasm beyond all bounds. He is the 
idol of the common people. 

"We came to London on Tuesday; charming weather and 
beautiful country. The Parkers were waiting for us at Euston 
Station, and received us with overflowing cordiality. . . . 

"If I had ten times the [self] appreciation which I have, I 
must have been satisfied with my public reception. The great 
dailies announced my arrival with leading editorials — and all 
kind; letters pour in by the bushel, Pond receiving sixty on a 
single morning. Dr. Allon had letters for me at Queenstown, 
and called on me at once in London. I am to lunch with him 
to-day, Friday, July 2d; goto the Lord Mayor's dinner at seven; 
invited to Mr. Phelps' (our minister) next Monday. On to-day 
week a dinner is to be given me, to which eminent men in all 
ranks of life are to come, and various other attentions are 
preparing. In the midst of all these goings-on, I hope that I 
am not ungrateful in saying that one day at Peekskill is fuller 
of joy than any of them, and that an old-fashioned tea at 
a friend's old house has in it more pith of joy than the whole 
of them! 

" I forgot to mention that yesterday I heard Dr. Parker give 
an admirable sermon at the City Temple. After it, while tak- 
ing up a collection, he announced my presence, and said that 
I would make the closing prayer. On my ascending the pul- 
pit, he said that he had a word first, and proceeded to some 
cordial words of introduction, and then, in the name of the 
church in City Temple, to give a welcome to Old England. 



20 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Such an enthusiasm broke out that one might have thought it 
was a political crowd cheering a victory. They clapped, they 
rose and cheered, they waved their handkerchiefs, and for a 
few moments it seemed as if the roof would fall in. I have 
received many ovations in my life, but none, circumstances 
considered, that surpassed this. His climax was somewhat in 
this wise: 'A few weeks ago, in speaking of our affairs, I 
mentioned that England had one " Grand Old Man" [alluding 
to Gladstone]; to-day she has two.' Whereat they fairly 
foamed! I am to preach for him on Sunday morning, and 
again next week on his Thursday sermon. So you see I am 
not likely to stagnate for a while. 

"As yet, we have seen little of London; we shall begin to- 
day. Tell that two editions of ' Evolution and Religion ' 

have been sold, and a third is on hand. The truth is spread- 
ing. Leading clergymen here are in their own minds as much 
believers as I am, nor do I find that any special prejudice will 
exist against me from this cause. 

' ' I have been urgently invited to speak upon the Irish Ques- 
tion, but have stoutly declined, not because my heart is not with 
Gladstone, but because it would put a club into the hands of the 
Tories, and on the whole do more evil than good. When at Liv- 
erpool, in an audience of five thousand, before Gladstone ar- 
rived, as soon as I came to the platform there arose a storm 
of applause which swept in gusts again and again all over the 
house — cheers, clapping, waving of handkerchiefs. I was re- 
quested by the manager to go back to the ante-room and 
receive Mr. Gladstone. I was introduced to him, to Mrs. 
Gladstone, and to their daughter, and I spoke with him and 
complimented his speech, saying, ' I had no words to ex- 
press myself of its excellence. ' To which he replied simply, 
' Certainly you are a good judge of such efforts. ' After 
Gladstone had finished, an effort was made by the audience to 
call me out, but I could not be made to understand what they 
wanted, and soon got away. 

" I think I am better known in England than in America: 
the cab-drivers and the very boys seemed familiar to recog- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. • 21 

nize me, and certainly my sermons are far more circulated 
and read in England than in America; but then the English 
are a sermon-reading people. 

"I almost blush to be chronicling myself so largely, but 
then, you know, 'it's all in the family,' and ' I won't do so 
again.'" 

A couple of days after our arrival in London Mr. 
Beecher was interviewed by a representative of the 
Daily Netvs, and this is what he said about the English 
elections, as reported by the News : 

" A comparison of past and present experience in England 
leads Mr. Beecher to some interesting observations on English 
as compared with American elections. 'When I was here 
before, you know,' said the pastor of Brooklyn Church, ' I came 
out of a storm and tornado on our side. That storm is all 
gone there now, but I come to find it here in England about 
your own affairs. But, on the whole, the English elections 
have been far more quiet externally than I had been led to 
expect they would be. I have ridden down your streets dur- 
ing the voting time, and, although I saw activity enough, I 
saw nothing that equalled the intense excitement that exists 
in our own country at our Presidential elections. Our even- 
ings there are great times during an election. The clubs and 
the various wards of the city, and even the people of different 
occupations, organize processions with band of music, and 
banners, and mottoes, and all manner of emblems. The city 
at night is one wild hubbub. It is all good-natured, though. 
Almost never any fighting. There were monster processions 
preceding the election of Cleveland, such as never were seen in 
New York City before — processions extending three or four 
miles; processions which could not pass any given point under 
two or three hours; and yet, as far as I know, there never was an 
arrest, or any occasion for one. Yes, I see you have had some 
disturbances reported in to-day's papers, but I understand 



22 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

how exceptional these are, and I am agreeably surprised at 
the tranquillity and apparent orderliness with which you are 
passing through these exciting times.' 

"Mr. Beecher has attended one political meeting in this 
country. He stayed in Liverpool a day longer than he in- 
tended, in order to be present at Mr. Gladstone's meeting 
there. ' It was full of novelty to me,' he explained, ' and full 
of the greatest interest. I was there simply as a spectator 
watching English human nature, and also much absorbed in 
Mr. Gladstone's eloquence. The meeting, I have heard, was 
exceptionally enthusiastic. It differed from our American 
meetings, perhaps, in there being a little more violence of ex- 
citement and more continuous noise of applause. Our New 
England audiences are more reserved. With your people there 
is a sort of exterior stolidity — I won't say that: undemonstra- 
tiveness is the word. But when you do let fly, I think you 
atone for all the reserve before. You make a tremendous 
row.' 

" 'There is one thing,' said Mr. Beecher, entering upon a 
kind of neutral survey of the political battle now raging here 
— ' there is one thing that the English can hardly understand 
in the situation of a man like myself. All the men that are 
in conflict now, swinging their war-clubs and hitting each 
other on the head, are in some sense projected on our histori- 
cal canvas. "We read them, and we read of them, and we are 
profoundly interested in them. They are, in a sense, ideal 
characters to us over there, and we have them in the greatest 
reverence and respect. Mr. Gladstone is in that way like men 
already gone— like Pitt and Fox. We have not seen him. 
We have read his books, and seen him gradually unfolding 
from the earlier and upper-ecclesiastical condition in which he 
was, and, like the swelling of the vine in summer-time, with 
additional clusters constantly coming out in widening and 
forthputting life; and so he stands out like another man. And 
now, when I come here and find Mr. Bright dealing blows at 
Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Gladstone pelting letters at Mr. Bright, 
it seems to me as though it must have been a comedy got up 



WITH HENRY" WARD BEECHER. 23 

for the occasion. To find these persons, all who seemed to ns 
beings in the air, as it were, doing just as other folks do — 
well, it is a strange illusion that it produces. In English 
politics one in my position must follow some of the leaders ; 
but the men we have been accustomed to follow have got their 
hands in each other's hair. That perplexes us. We stand 
off. If the American standpoint were taken, the question at 
issue would be as simple as A B C; but when we come over 
here, there are details rather than principles separating these 
great men, and on these details we are not informed. While, 
therefore, in the first instance our whole thought would go 
with Gladstone, yet when we come to read the other men we 
say to ourselves, " I do not see exactly how this can be met," 
and then we are puzzled. But it is on the detail and not on 
the general scheme at all. It is the working it into shape to 
suit institutions that already exist, or to the changes that it 
is supposed will follow.' " 



24 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER II. 

SERMONIZING, ETC. 

Mr. Beecher preached his first sermon in City Tem- 
ple the Sunday following, July 4th. The congregation 
were admitted by ticket; church-members first, and then 
the public, to the capacity of the auditorium. Hun- 
dreds came who had to be turned away. That week 
the papers teemed with praise for the great American 
preacher. Every daily paper in London had some kind 
notice of him. It is not usual in England for the secu- 
lar press to notice religious doings, especially those of 
Dissenters. This is left to the religious weekly papers. 

Each denomination has its well-supported organ, and 
a number of these papers are thoroughly established, 
their influence extending literally to the limits of civili- 
zation. The Christian World circulates all over the 
world, and is known as the foremost of religious jour- 
nals; it is non-sectarian. Advertising is more expen- 
sive in this paper than in a large London daily. The 
Methodist Times and the Primitive Methodist are organs 
of their respective denominations, and circulate far and 
wide. The Baptist is a well-established oracle of the 
creed of its name. The Non- Conformist and Indepen- 
dent is the organ of the Congregational Church, and is 
considered authority on Congregationalism. There are 
many others that have their special supports. The 
Christian Age is a Calvinistic paper. The Christian 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 25 

Herald and Signs of the Times has an enormous circu- 
lation amongst the lower classes. It is illustrated with 
large wood-cuts, exactly calculated for its class of read- 
ers. It contains stories and religious news and churchi- 
fied secular news. It is edited by a clergyman of the 
Church of England, who stands in great favor with the 
great masses that this paper instructs. 

More generous newspaper criticisms could not have 
been written than Mr. Beecher received at the hands of 
both the secular and religious press. The Daily Neivs 
published his sermon nearly verbatim. It seemed 
strange to English editors that a religious congregation 
should be allowed to smile, and in its closing editorial 
comments the News said: 

" It was a sermon of great power, emphatically the expres- 
sion of a strong personality, and with all its characteristics 
subordinate to this leading one of a dominating will. The 
preacher seemed to be very much in earnest, and not least so 
in his many humorous effects. The congregation often smiled, 
and sometimes laughed outright ; yet there was no sense of 
incongruity, mainly because the humor seemed always the 
mere accident of expression, and not a thing sought for itself. 
It is strange preaching. We are not called upon here to esti- 
mate its spiritual value. Certainly the letters to which Dr. 
Parker referred subsequently — in announcing that Mr. Beecher 
would be heard in the same place next Thursday — would tend 
to show that for many in England its value must be high. 
With perhaps one notable exception it is unlike anything we 
are accustomed to here. In its strength and tenderness of 
humor, above all in its self-confidence, running sometimes 
into a kind of irreverent audacity, it has all the qualities of 
the spiritual soil from which it springs." 

The Globe (Church of England) said : 



26 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

"To Churchmen, accustomed to the pure serenity of the 
Book of Common Prayer, and to the always chastened utter- 
ances of their preachers, there is necessarily something start- 
ling in the importation of humor into hortatory discourses. 
There are, of course, degrees in humor ; it may lie merely in 
emphasis on a word, in a twinkle of the eye, or in a curl of 
the lip, as well as in quaintness of expression, or in the inten- 
tionally ' funny ' anecdote. 

"It does not appear, however, that Mr. Beecher descends 
to the tricks of the buffoon. His humor would seem to be 
merely occasional and illustrative, and not altogether on the 
surface. 'Love vaunteth not itself,' says the Apostle, and 
Mr Beecher adds : ' It does not, every time it lays a golden 
egg, rise from the nest to cackle.' 'Love is not puffed up,' 
says St. Paul, and Mr. Beecher cries: ' O ! that some men 
might be touched with a lancet; how the puffed- upness would 
come down ! ' " 

The Daily Standard and Daily Telegraioh were quite 
as favorably impressed. The Christian World pub- 
lished the sermon entire, and columns of editorial com- 
ments. In a leading article it said : 

" The sermons of Mr. Henry Ward Beecher are like a fresh 
breeze from the Atlantic. We refer not only to the raciness 
of their language, which guarantees wakefulness even to the 
most crowded congregation in summer weather, but also, and 
still more, to the plain common-sense philosophy of his teach- 
ing. But there is one aspect of his doctrine which interests 
us more than all the others, and that is his constant insist- 
ence on life, conduct, practical morality, as the truest essence 
of religion, and the present significance of salvation. We do 
not, of course, suggest that this line of thought is peculiar to 
Mr. Beecher. It is in the air ; it pervades Christian society ; 
it is breathed by the spirit of the age; still, there is a sense in 
which Mr. Beecher and other American prophets have a 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 27 

special testimony to bear which is not often heard precisely 
in the same tones on this side of the Atlantic. 

' ' Mr. Beecher's physique would mark him out in any as- 
sembly as a man of unusual strength of character and intel- 
lectual power. That full brow, like ' some tall cliff that lifts 
its awful form ;' that serene, massive mouth, automatically 
eloquent; those slightly prominent eyes, capable of vivid fire- 
flashes, only needed kindling to show themselves the sanctu- 
ary of a lofty inspiration, the temple and organs of a God- 
given genius. 

" Who can describe that sermon so as to convey any ade- 
quate impression to the minds of those who did not hear it ? 
So full of racy humor and philosophic elevation; so replete 
with double-distilled common-sense; so original in its struct- 
ure and ideas, enforced with so much felicity of phrase, fer- 
vor of delivery, and dramatic force; so alive at all points; so 
fresh and breezy; so full of light and shade; a strain of high 
reasoning, suddenly passing into a vein of playful satire ; im- 
passioned declamation, softening down into the most moving 
pathos; or a bit of logical analysis, culminating in a poetic 
image of exquisite beauty, — the whole so telling and interest- 
ing, so many-sided, and so human. If any critic chooses to 
pick out an Americanism here and there, or to scent an occa- 
sional violation of the strictest canon of good taste, he is wel- 
come to his congenial but unsavory task. For ourselves, hav- 
ing heard that sermon, we feel disposed to pronounce our 
own ' Nunc Dimittis. ' 

' ' It was a great sermon — great in all the elements of pow- 
erful and moving public address. It was a healthy sermon, 
such as no dyspeptic could have preached, — robust in its 
thinking, winsome in its appeals, with flashes of wit like the 
violet summer lightning playing continually around the theme. 
One did not wonder that such preaching, so intellectual in its 
quality, and yet going home so straight to all the actual expe- 
riences and necessities of human life, should be the attractive 
force it is to hearers of every type, — merchants, statesmen, 
and men of all the professions. If we could graft a bit of 



28 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Beecher on to the present race of theological students, the 
pulpit would become a power in our generation with which 
philosopher, statesman, and journalist alike would have to 
reckon. ... He is tribune and prophet in one." 

The Non- Conformist and Independent published the 
sermon verbatim, with column editorial notices. The 
Christian Union published his portrait and two columns 
of editorial comment, which I wish I had room to 
quote : but there is a whole season to recount ; I only 
extract the following : 

' ' On Sunday morning the City Temple was crowded to its 
utmost capacity with a notable audience to hear Henry Ward 
Beecher. Among the congregation were ministers of all de- 
nominations, including clergymen — high, low, and broad — and 
Koman Catholic priests; while here and there might be seen 
distinguished actors, authors, barristers, politicians, and mem- 
bers of the learned professions. Never since the early days 
of Edward Irving's ministry has there assembled in one con- 
gregation an auditory so characteristic for men of all shades 
of belief and stations in life. So eager, indeed, were London- 
ers to hear the Brooklyn preacher, that it was remarked if 
the City Temple had been ten times its present size it would 
have been filled. Such a fact only shows that Mr. Beecher's 
name is a household word with the religious public in London. 

' ' As St. Paul's struck the hour of eleven, Mr. Beecher en- 
tered the pulpit, when the eyes of the whole assembly were 
instantly fixed upon his calm and majestic face. For a mo- 
ment his lips quivered with evident nervousness, and his 
hand slightly trembled as he raised it to lead the morning's 
devotion. It was manifest that his heart was touched, for 
his voice faltered a little as, in great simplicity of words, he 
invoked the blessing of Heaven on that worshipping throng. 
The emotion manifested by Mr. Beecher produced a sympa- 
thetic effect upon his auditory which was sustained to the 
end of the service. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 29 

" After prayer, Mr. Beecher read the new version of the thir- 
teenth chapter of the First Corinthians. Though he read the 
chapter without note or comment, he seemed to bring out of it 
a freshness of interpretation that made it new to the spiritual 
discernment. 

" After the singing of an anthem, Mr. Beecher chose for his 
text, ' And the greatest of these is Love. ' Then for the 
first time he looked his congregation full in the face in calm 
contemplation. The sermon, which occupied an hour in the 
delivery, was one of the most impressive we ever -listened to. 
And yet it would be difficult to say where lay the secret that 
held spell-bound for an hour, on that 4th of July, the at- 
tention of so vast an assembly. The first thing that im- 
pressed us in Mr. Beecher's utterances was that he spoke to 
the people from the fulness of his heart. He seemed to have 
a story to unfold — a story in which his own inmost soul had 
experienced some conflict or illumination. Slowly but co- 
gently one thought after another was thrown off from the 
speaker's mind, each thought touching more sensibly the ten- 
der chords of the human heart. Now and again Mr. Beecher 
paused in his discourse, as if waiting for some new inspira- 
tion of thought — his eyes, while looking into space, eloquent 
with mental penetration. Step by step he carried his audi- 
ence along with him in thought, while he sought to set at rest 
some of the questionings that perplex seekers after truth, and 
which had awakened in himself much anxious thought. 

' ' Perhaps one of the most distinguishing features in Mr. 
Beecher's sermon was the unique largeness of his theology — 
we had almost said his perfect freedom from it. For he has 
evidently got out of the shallow waters of dogmatism and 
ecclesiasticism into the higher realm of mind. He clings to 
the ' old faith' and the ' old truth,' but without the trappings 
with which theologians have enshrouded them. ' I am a free 
man,' he cried in one of the ecstatic moments on Sunday morn- 
ing— reminding one of a bird that had escaped from impris- 
onment into the free air of the sunny heavens. And the 
bright radiance that played upon his countenance told too 



30 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

plainly lie was free from the leading-strings of orthodoxy, so 
called, and from the shackles of man-made creeds and pro- 
fessional dogmas." 

From a three-column editorial in the London Chris- 
tian Union I extract the following : 

' ' So ended a remarkable and memorable service. As the 
years roll on, we shall often think of the grand old American 
preacher who, on a bright July morning in 1886, talked to us 
in brave, sweet words about the gospel of love." 

Mr. Beecher had from the 4th to the 19th of July 
" to play," as he called it, or to do as he pleased. He 
dined with the Lord Mayor of London on Monday, the 
5th. On Tuesday he wrote letters and received callers, 
and in the evening he and Mrs. Beecher, with Dr. and 
Mrs. Parker, on invitation from Mr. Henry Irving vis- 
ited the Lyceum Theatre to witness his and Miss Ter- 
ry's performance in the play of "Faust." Wednesday 
Mrs. Parker gave a reception. Mr. Beecher preached 
again for Dr. Parker in the City Temple on Thursday, 
July 8th, to another overflowing congregation, and with 
as many more enthusiastic notices from the press. As 
on former occasions, the congregation had to be ad- 
mitted by ticket, and, since many were unable to secure 
tickets, a rumor easily started in one of the religious 
papers that Mr. Beecher was preaching the Gospel for 
money, and that tickets to hear him preach were sold at 
the doors of the house of the Lord. The secular press 
took it up; American news-correspondents cabled it to 
their respective journals across the Atlantic ; the Lon- 
don Truth enlarged upon it, and Labouchere's letter to 
the New York World repeated it. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 31 

I wrote the following letter to the editor of The Bap- 
tist, which was published in that paper. It was also 
kindly inserted in the leading papers of nearly every 
city where Mr. Beecher lectured or preached: 

CHARGING TO HEAR THE GOSPEL. 

To the Editor of " The Baptist." 

Dear Sir : May I be allowed to correct a statement made 
in your excellent paper of the 23d inst. concerning Mr. 
Beecher and his lectures and sermons ? 

Mr. Beecher does not charge for preaching outside his own 
pulpit in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. I have managed all 
his lecture tours for the past fifteen years, and I have always 
arranged that he should preach on the Sabbath while absent 
from home, and that under no circumstances was there to be 
a charge of any kind made for hearing him preach the Gospel. 
True, when in other cities, in order to protect pew-holders and 
members of the regular congregations, it has been necessary 
to issue tickets of admission to the side doors before the house 
was opened to the general public. 

Mr. Beecher is a lecturer as well as preacher. He delivers 
on an average 150 lectures a year, and has during some sea- 
sons lectured upwards of 250 times, besides preaching every 
Sabbath. He lectures because he finds it profitable both to 
himself and to those who are glad to pay their money to hear 
him ; but never has he received a penny for preaching outside 
his own pulpit: and if London were bullion, and he could have 
it for preaching one sermon here, it would not even tempt 
him. 

Mr. Beecher receives from me the same pay per lecture that 
I give him in America. My business is furnishing lectures 
and high-class entertainments to lyceums and lecture associa- 
tions in America. I supply lecture and musical societies 
throughout the United States with the best talent to be had. 
It is part of the American system of education, and the 



32 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Americans are educated to it, and generally prefer it to trashy- 
shows. They expect great men to address them ; and when 
Dean Stanley, Prof. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer came to 
America, I had hundreds of applications from all parts of the 
land asking their terms and approximate date ; and when I 
replied that these men could not be secured, many of my con- 
stituents accused me of shiftlessness and neglect of business, 
and poured upon me all sorts of abuse because I did not sup- 
ply them. I have ' ' imported " a great deal of English talent : 
George Dawson, Canon Kingsley, Bellew, Matthew Arnold, 
and last season Canon Farrar — who made a great deal of 
money in America, lectured every day and preached twice 
every Sabbath for three months. He was not abused nor 
falsely accused because of his success. Thousands tried to get 
tickets to hear him preach. They were not to be had, as the 
church congregations where he preached had them for them- 
selves and friends. Canon Farrar received £200 each for his 
last three lectures in America, and the management made as 
much more. The public were not only satisfied but grateful 
that so rare an opportunity had been offered them. 

Mr. Beecher is not a rich man, nor a money-lover. He does 
not know what becomes of his money. He lives the Gospel 
that he preaches. He has many drafts on his purse that he 
would like to meet. He does all that he can to assist the 
needy. He has 2,800 members of his church, all as dear as 
his children to him. Keverses overtake many. His name is 
the first that goes on a note to give a deserving friend a new 
start in life. Could you but know a hundredth part of the 
good he is constantly doing, you would be as ardent a believer 
as I am. I bring him to England during his summer vaca- 
tion to lecture. He gets every penny from me for his lectures 
that he gets from any service in Great Britain. He wants to 
preach every Sunday, so I leave Saturdays open, and place 
the Sundays where he likes to preach. If it were money we 
were after, I would have him lecture Saturdays and rest Sun- 
days, and make £25 to £100 myself, and he £50 better off 
[every week] so far as this world's goods are concerned. The 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 33 

ministers for whom lie preaches manage their own congrega- 
tions, and Mr. Beecher does not know as much about it as 
you do. 

Referring to Mr. Spurgeon on this subject of " charging to 
hear a sermon," where "the managers charged a shilling to 
hear him preach," and he remarked that " if he had known it 
he never would have preached," I will ask you to kindly ex- 
plain the difference between charging a shilling and doing as I 
have on three different occasions when I went to hear Mr. 
Spurgeon with some friends. By putting money in a box at 
the side door I was allowed to go in and get seats, and I 
always found that a good-sized congregation was accommo- 
dated in this way by ' ' paying what they liked " before the 
main doors were opened to the general public. 

If this is not charging an admission, I want to know what it 
is. I certainly could not have got a comfortable seat unless I 
complied with this custom. 

I am yours very truly, 

J. B. Pond, 
Manager of Henry Ward Beecher 's Lectures. 

On Friday evening, July 9th, a banquet was given to 
Mr. Beecher at Hotel Metropole by Mr. Henry F. Gil- 
lig, of the American Exchange. Eighty people sat 
down to the dinner. At the right of the host sat the 
guest, and on his left the American Minister to Eng- 
land, Hon. E. J. Phelps. Among the guests were Rev. 
Dr. Joseph Parker of London ; Sir Francis Wyatt Trus- 
cott, Alderman of London ; the Hon. Stanley Mat- 
thews, of the United States Supreme Court ; Mr. James 
Wyld, F.R.GLS., D.O.L.; the Eev. James Fleming, 
D.D., Canon of York ; Hon. Thomas M. Waller, IT. S. 
Consul ; Hon. Charles F. Russell, II. S. Consul, Liver- 
pool ; Mr. J. C. Horsley, R.A., Treasurer of the Royal 
Academy; Rev. John R. Higgle, M.A., Chairman of 
3 



34 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

the School Board of London ; Eev. E. H. Haweis ; Mr. 
T. P. O'Connor, M.P.; Eev. E. A. Horton of Boston, 
Mass. ; Mr. Charles Dickens ; Mr. Christopher Eales ; 
Hon. John B. Hughes, U. S. Consul at Birmingham ; 
Mr. James Clark of the Christian World, and other 
well-known citizens of Great Britain, including repre- 
sentatives of the London press. 

Eloquent and enthusiastic addresses of welcome, of 
grateful acknowledgment for Mr. Beecher's teachings, 
and wishes for his long life and continued good works, 
followed one upon another. Mr. Beecher's speech is 
given in this volume, in full. It was the first of his 
public addresses. Invitations to lecture and to preach 
now came by the hundreds from all parts of the King- 
dom. Ministers were constantly asking for Mr. Beecher's 
terms for preaching. They were willing to pay more for 
sermons than for lectures; but ascertaining that sermons 
were not purchasable, they then insisted on lectures. 

Sunday, July 11th, was an interesting day. Mr. 
Beecher preached in Union Chapel, Islington, London, 
for his old friend, Eev. Dr. Henry Allon, the scholarly 
representative of the highest class of cultivated, well- 
educated Congregationalists. There was as great a con- 
gregation of intelligent people as I have ever seen. The 
usual system of first admitting members of the society 
by ticket was adopted exclusively up to a certain hour. 
Then the doors were thrown open to the public, and the 
large auditorium immediately packed to its utmost ca- 
pacity. As great a throng outside Wa,s unable to get 
in. 

After service, and dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Allon, he 
and I attended service at Westminster Abbey, and by 
previous invitation called upon Dean Bradley, where a 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 35 

number of clergymen of the Church of England were 
gathered to meet him. Tea was served, and the Dean 
invited Mr. Beecher through the various historical pri- 
vate rooms about the Abbey. Dean Stanley's library 
and desk were just as when he died. Incidents and 
anecdotes of their late friend were exchanged between 
Dean Bradley and Mr. Beecher. The accompanying 
clergymen listened to the dialogue as though fearing to 
lose a word. As. Mr. Beecher entered the Jerusalem 
Chamber, he said : 

"I am struck with awe. No room has greater inter- 
est to me, unless it be the ' Upper Boom/ " 

He recalled with remarkable rapidity and correctness 
the many religious events that had taken place there — 
the Westminster Assembly and Confession of Faith, the 
two revisions of the Bible, etc. ; and the eminent and 
scholarly men brought up within the very gates of that 
sanctuary listened with intense interest to his familiar 
but eloquent exposition of what must have seemed their 
own peculiar province of history. 

I shall never forget the afternoon, which passed away 
so quickly that it seemed there must have been some 
fault in the reckoning of time. I wish I might recollect 
the names of the accompanying gentlemen ; but every 
one's interest and attention went to a common centre. 

The next notable incident came on Tuesday, the 11th. 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher and myself had been invited to 
dine with Mr. Henry Irving at his home in Hammer- 
smith, London. " The Grange" is the name of his 
beautiful villa place of about six acres. Here, as Mrs. 
Parker truly expressed it, is " a poem in a dwelling." 
After passing through Mr. Irving's grounds and his 
house, Mr. Beecher remarked (Mr. Irving having re- 



36 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

mained outside): "This is the only place I have yet 
seen that surpasses Peekskill." Indeed, no one but 
Henry Irving, with his life-long study of art, a traveller 
and a genius, could have conceived such delicacy and 
harmony as we that day enjoyed at "The Grange/'' and 
his hospitality was in keeping with the surroundings. 

The day following Mr. and Mrs. Beecher yielded to 
the incessant importunings of the photographer. This 
consumed a day, and tired us out. Messrs. Elliott and 
Fry wanted so many sittings that the long hours yielded 
equally long faces. 

I had advertised Mr. Beecher's first lecture to take 
place the following Monday, July 19th, and now such 
encouraging reports came from the box office that my 
brother Ozias and myself (associated in business) began 
to feel a very natural elation. I told Mr. Beecher he 
was " sure to be great." He replied as usual under like 
circumstances : 

" That's your part, not mine." He never, in all my 
lecture experience, showed the slightest gratification at 
a large audience, or disappointment at a small one. I 
remarked once, while on a tour in America, "Mr. 
Beecher, we have a small audience to-night." He re- 
plied : 

" Well, I shall have to give them a better lecture." 

On his third Sunday Mr. Beecher preached in West- 
minster Chapel, Westminster, London. This, of course, 
will not be confounded with Westminster Abbey. It is 
one of the first Congregational churches in London, and 
its pastor won my heart by his extreme gentleness of 
manner, and love and appreciation of Mr. Beecher. 

"This," said Mr. Beecher after service, "is the first 
Sunday since arriving in England that I have felt that 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 37 

I was preaching." The congregation was of the accus- 
tomed capacity of the house. 

The Sunday following he preached in Westbourne 
Park Chapel for Eev. Dr. Clifford. That was a Baptist 
"church/' as we Americans would call it, and Dr. Clif- 
ford one of the leaders of thought and action among the 
Baptist ministers of England. 

Of this Sabbath with Mr. Beecher, Dr. Clifford edi- 
torially writes in The Baptist of July 30, 1886: 

"'Printed prayers' have failed to subdue 'a prejudice' 
born with me against putting the sacred pleadings of living 
souls into the cold frigidity of type. Even the spiritual wealth 
of Mr. Beecher's prayers has not vanquished my Puritanic 
hostility. But to hear him pray, — this is totally different, and 
goes far to make his ' volume of prayers ' a new and welcome 
book to me. The surprising freshness as of a spring morn- 
ing, the healing radiance as of a summer sun, the astonishing 
opulence as of harvest plenty, carry the spirit right into the 
presence of the Eternal Father, and make communion with 
him so intensely real and deeply inspiring that the brief mo- 
ment is luminous with the light, and rich with the power of 
God. Not a hackneyed expression or an Ill-chosen word; not 
a solitary halt in the pellucid flow of spiritual yearning; not 
the faintest taint of striving after effect, but the most con- 
vincing evidence of striving after, or rather of actual fellow- 
ship with, God. Anything more simple, rest-giving, than his 
language, more sweet than the spirit of resignation and trust 
he breathed, or more gladdening than the joy he communi- 
cated, I do not remember ever to have experienced in the ser- 
vices of God's Church. Long will those hallowed moments live 
in memory and life. 

1 ' Mr. Beecher must be heard to be fairly judged. The 
chief charm and central inspiring force is the man. The 
whole soul of the man lives in his preaching. There is no 
vaporous rhetoric, no glittering phrase-making, no mere 



38 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

embroidery of speech; but an overwhelming spiritual reality, 
a life that has been lived with God, and speaks as from the 
divine presence, strong in soul-forces of unaffected goodness, 
victorious faith, and large-hearted love of men, a blending 
and interfusing of high moral and intellectual qualities, which 
fills you with a sense and emotion of the marvellous. As I 
meditated on what I had heard, I instantly recalled the 
wealth of ideas of John Foster, the large views of Kobertson, 
the rich fancy of Jeremy Taylor, the wit and shrewd humor 
of Thomas Fuller, the spirituality of Thomas a Kempis, and 
the burning love of the Apostle John. " 

The next Sunday, August 1st, the Beechers reserved 
for rest, and visited the English Lakes with their friends, 
Dr. and Mrs. Parker. This was the only Sabbath rest, 
except the one on the voyage, he had taken for eighteen 
months. His sermons at Bradford, Liverpool, Carlisle, 
Glasgow, Edinburgh, Scarborough, Torquay, Brighton, 
West Norwood (London), and Harecourt Chapel (Lon- 
don), the address to Theological Students in City Tem- 
ple (London), and his farewell sermon in England at 
Dr. Parker's church in London, October 17th, were all 
fraught with equal interest. Each sermon is given in 
full. 

Of the love and welcome expressed by the Christian 
clergymen and ministers everywhere it would require 
volumes to give an account. But Mr. and Mrs. Beech- 
er's reception by the London Congregational Board I 
give in full, so far as cold type can express it; one must 
have been a witness to the glorious scenes that took 
place in Memorial Hall, September 26, 1886, to fully 
comprehend it. It was worth a journey across the 
Atlantic to be there. The visit to Mr. James Clark, 
editor and proprietor of the Christian World, at his 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 39 

beautiful residence in Caterham; the address to the 
School of Congregational Ministers' Sons; the address 
to the Theological Students at City Temple, London, 
and to the Freedman's Aid Society in Westminster 
Chapel, October 16th; the welcome at Liverpool by the 
Congregational District Board, October 18th, and the 
reception in Belfast, are all events in the religious 
history of our century. Mr. Beecher's remarks on these 
occasions also are all given in this volume, and I trust 
will be read and enjoyed in proportion as I enjoyed en- 
gineering the collecting and preserving of them. 

I will make a special allusion to the meeting with the 
Theological Students in City Temple on Friday morn- 
ing, October 15th. There were about six hundred to 
whom Mr. Beecher was to talk. The remaining seats 
of the Temple were set aside for ministers and clergy- 
men, who were admitted on presentation of their per- 
sonal cards at the door. These were taken up at the 
door by my request; and I now have the cards of 618 
ministers who, in addition to the students, attended 
this meeting. 



40 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTEE III. 

LECTURING BEGINS. 

From July 3d until we started again for America, 
October 23d, Mr. Beecher's "time" belonged to me ; and 
I propose to give the exact facts because there was much 
inexcusable misrepresentation as to money matters pub- 
lished, both in England and America, about this business. 
By arrangements made before leaving home, I was to 
pay him two hundred dollars a night to lecture five nights 
in the week. Saturdays he reserved for rest, and Sun- 
days I was to arrange for him to preach in the large 
cities ; congregations to be admitted free and without any 
form or appearance of money-taking at the doors, such 
as is practised in some English chapels. The first lec- 
ture took place in Exeter Hall, London, on Monday 
evening, July 19th. 

It was in this same hall that Mr. Beecher had spoken 
last in England, at the close of his previous visit duri-ng 
our American Civil War. At that time our Union 
cause was so greatly misunderstood that it was extremely 
difficult to find in all London a person willing to pre- 
side at the hall. Now all was changed. I believe 
scarcely a clergyman or minister in the city would have 
declined the honor. But Mr. Beecher said to me : 

" Pond, when I spoke here in 1863, and was having 
hard work to find some one to preside, Mr. Benjamin 
Scott, Chamberlain of the city of London, volunteered 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 41 

his services. See if you can find him ; I want him to 
take the chair to-night." 

I did find him, still Chamberlain of the city. He 
very modestly referred me to others who he said would 
gladly preside and would lend more honor to the occa- 
sion than could he ; but at length he kindly consented 
to serve for this second time. A large audience of ladies 
and gentlemen packed the great hall ; and when Mr. 
Scott appeared, the memory of his earlier action still 
green, the burst of applause grew as it continued, the 
audience finally rising, waving handkerchiefs and cheer- 
ing. 

Mr. Scott briefly referred to the meeting in the hall 
twenty- three years ago. He had never regretted occu- 
pying the position filled on that occasion, and now Mr. 
Beecher had asked him to be present again. 

Mr. Beecher rose, and was again greeted with great 
cheers and applause. He stood silent and impassive, 
his face seemingly untouched by emotion, as he looked 
around upon the vast audience. As the applause died 
away, he began to speak ; but before he could make 
himself heard the applause was again repeated, with 
additional emphasis, if possible, and Mr. Beecher waited 
again for it to cease. Then, in a strong voice that 
reverberated round the hall, he recalled the previous 
meeting. " A long lapse of time in a man's life," he 
said, ' ' and such lapses give solidity to a man's opinion ; 
they also give sagacity." 

He was not surprised at the view some people took of 
America; they did not know the facts. " America is 
the younger tree, but the acorns from which it sprang 
fell from the English oak. Americans are of English 
lineage and blood. If England is not proud of America, 



42 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

why, then the latter will make her so." A remark 
which aroused much applause. 

Among the ministers and clergymen upon the plat- 
form were Canon Farrar, Canon Fleming, Canon Wil- 
berforce, Rev. Dr. Henry Allon, Rev. Dr. R. H. Haweis, 
Rev. Dr. Clifford, Rev. Dr. Davidson, Rev. Mr. Simon, 
Rev. Oswald Dykes, Mr. James Clark of the Christian 
World, and other well-known English preachers and ed- 
itors. The lecture — that one on the " Reign of the Com- 
mon People" which so many thousands of Americans 
have heard with pleasure (and no two audiences ever 
heard alike !) — occupied nearly two hours in delivery, 
and was frequently interrupted by applause and cheers. 

By way of offering impartial evidence as to the manner 
of his reception on this and other occasions, and because 
there was evident in America at the time an unwilling- 
ness among the newspapers to let it be known how 
warmly he was welcomed on every hand, I offer a few 
quotations from the British press ; taking no other 
liberty with them than to omit matter that would only 
repeat earlier quotations. The Daily Neivs of July 20th 
reported : 

"Exeter Hall filled and Mr. Beecher enthusiastically re- 
ceived, the audience rising and waving handkerchiefs." 

(Then follows a verbatim report of the lecture.) 

The Daily Telegraph, after speaking of the audience 
in similar words, said : 

" At the outset of his address, Mr. Beecher, referring to his 
mission here twenty-three years ago, and remarking that time 
corrected many hasty impressions, said that when he looked 
back at all the things that happened at and before the period 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 43 

of his visit, he could scarcely reproach the English people for 
their misjudgment of the great issue that God was then trying 
by the arbitrament of the sword. The reverend gentleman, 
whilst not sparing the foibles of the American people, warmly 
praised their system of education and self-government, declar- 
ing that under it there was greater general wealth, happiness, 
and contentment than had ever been found in any country 
under any system. He expressed sympathy with those who 
were struggling against arbitrary power in the other parts of 
the world, though it did not follow that the people of the 
United States wanted Kussian Mhilists or German Socialists 
to go there to teach them how to secure good government. 
That was a trade which the Americans regarded as their own." 



The Daily Standard of July 20th said: 

" Although a charge for admission was made to all parts of 
the building, of from one to ten shillings each, the hall was 
filled very speedily, and only a few of the reserved seats on 
the platform remained unoccupied at the commencement of 
the proceedings. Mr. Beecher received a very hearty greet- 
ing, the cheering continuing for some minutes." 

(Here follows a column and a half of criticism.) 

The Daily Times of the same date says: 

"Exeter Hall was crowded in every part to hear Kev. 
Henry Ward Beecher lecture on ' The Keign of the Common 
People,' etc., etc. 

(A column synopsis of lecture.) 

It pleased the London Daily Globe to be cynical: 

" An essayist many years ago, in commenting on the too- 
familiar prayer of Burns for the gift of seeing ourselves as 
others see us, put a modicum of freshness into the platitude 



44 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

by concluding that, if we actually received that gift, we 
should see something exceedingly unlike ourselves. This is so 
perfectly certain, and so completely in accord with the uni- 
versal experience of foreign comment, that as a matter of 
course, being what we are, we rush, with a perfectly inex- 
haustible passion for being misinformed, to hang on the lips 
of every foreigner, however unqualified, to whom a few days 
of intercourse has given an impression or two of our social 
or political ways. In comparison with most of these intelli- 
gent strangers, Mr. Henry Ward Beecher undoubtedly pos- 
sesses many advantages. He came among us for the sake of 
correcting public opinion three-and-twenty years ago. No 
doubt the break of personal intercourse has been long, but 
then in most cases there is no intercourse to be broken. And 
yesterday evening at Exeter Hall he, with extraordinary pru- 
dence, avoided the politics of the hour. His object was to 
teach us how, by changing our habits and learning the les- 
sons of the West, the Common People may be educated so as 
to be fitted to reign. 

"Mr. Beecher has called at a place of business at nine 
o'clock in the morning and found nobody there. He has 
called at ten ; only the clerks were there : and not till eleven 
has the principal appeared. Now this is all very dreadful. 
It is flying in the face of the recipe for becoming not only 
wealthy, like all really good Americans, but healthy, also like 
that notoriously eupeptic people, and, above all things, wise 
like them, for in the way of developing popular intelligence 
' the Americans have nothing to learn. ' " 

(This is the beginning of a column and a half of sim- 
ilar editorial comment, showing at least not "indiffer- 
ence.") 

The Christian World said: 

' ' Mr. Beecher scored an Exeter Hall triumph on Tuesday 
evening ; for, with the exception of the part of the platform 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 45 

behind him, he succeeded in filling the hall, in spite of July 
heat and a wet night. The reserved seats had all been sold 
days beforehand ; and one hour before the time of the lecture 
a rushing multitude nearly filled the end of the gallery, 
while, as soon as Major Pond's gigantic form in evening dress 
had walked across the hall to remove the barrier that kept 
the crowd waiting at the side door, these poured in like 
sheep through a gap, to the cheaper of the reserved seats, and 
struggled for precedence with a fine Exeter Hall frenzy. Of 
ministers, the first to appear on the platform was the Eev. 
Dr. Allon, with four ladies in his charge ; and he was shortly 
followed by the Eev. Hiles Hitchens and Mr. James Clark ; 
while at a later period the Kevs. Donald Fraser, H. K. 
Haweis, J. Guiness Kogers, Archdeacon Farrar, Canon Flem- 
ing, Morlais Jones, and other well-known gentlemen occupied 
front seats. Dr. Parker was not there, but Mrs. Parker, in 
company with Mrs. Beecher, was. 

' ' Mr. Beecher came on the platform just in time to prevent 
a little exhibition of temper on the part of those who, un- 
amused by organ performance or other entertainment, had 
been biding their sixty minutes, and were in a humor to 
stand on their rights in the matter of punctuality. Mr. Ben- 
jamin Scott, the City Chamberlain, took the chair, as he had 
done twenty-three years before when Mr. Beecher came over 
and in the same place stood up to advocate the claims of the 
North. A roar of applause greeted the venerable orator him- 
self when he rose from his place and with stern-set features 
gazed forth upon his audience till such time as they should 
suffer him to speak. So had he twenty-three years before 
gazed there on a similar audience animated by a different 
spirit, and this fact his opening sentence recalled. 

1 ' For an hour and a quarter did Mr. Beecher discourse on 
the Reign of the Common People, as one who spoke freely ; 
for free he was from note, or manuscript, or book ; free in 
movement and gesture ; free in dramatic imitation of the 
omnisicient theologian, of the labored letter-writing of the 
school-boy, of that boy's pedantic usher, and of the wheezy 



46 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

legislature of the States ; free in the unfettered expression of 
his views, social, political, and religious ; and free in the in- 
dulgence of pleasant little bits of satire, sometimes exercised 
at the expense of the land of his birth, and sometimes at the 
expense of the land he is visiting, and sometimes at the ex- 
pense of the audience itself. One of these fell from him in 
connection with his chronic trouble of not making himself 
heard to the people at a distance ; a trouble which, as he is 
gradually accommodating himself to our notions, he was more 
successful in overcoming at the Hall than he had hitherto 
been. When some people complained that they could not 
hear, he remarked — to the huge delight of the rest of the 
people who had heard — ' That was the part I didn't want 
you to hear.' After this there were no complaints." 

The Non- Conformist and Independent said: 

"As was expected, a crowded audience gathered on Mon- 
day night at Exeter Hall to listen to Mr. Beecher's first 
lecture. His fame as a platform speaker is as great as his 
celebrity as a preacher, and possibly there are some persons 
who prefer him in the former capacity also. The subject 
announced was calculated to raise expectation very high, and 
we have heard the desire to obtain good places was so great 
that five-shilling reserved seats were selling for as much as 
one guinea each, on Monday last, by the fortunate first pur- 
chasers of them. Whether this was the case or not, the hall 
was filled to excess long before the hour of commencement." 

(Here follows a verbatim report of the lecture.) 

The second lecture was at Bristol, England, on the 
following evening, in Colston Hall, which has a seating 
capacity of three thousand five hundred people. The 
Bristol Western Daily Press said: 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 47 

"That the visit to Bristol of the distinguished American 
minister, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, excited considerable in- 
terest was shown by the large and representative audience 
which gathered at Colston Hall last evening to hear his lec- 
ture. The chair was taken by Mr. Lorin Lathrop, American 
consul in Bristol, and besides the lecturer there were several 
distinguished occupants of the platform." 

(Here follow two columns of editorial comment on 
the lecture.) 



The Bristol Mercury spoke with equal enthusiasm, 
and gave a two-column report of the lecture. Likewise 
did the Bristol Times and Mirror of the same day. 

The third, lecture was given at Cardiff, Wales, in Park 
Hall, which has about the same capacity as Colston Hall 
at Bristol. The Bristol Mercury said of the occasion: 

" At an early hour the great building began to fill, and by 
eight o'clock every seat was occupied. The eagerness which 
the audience felt to hear and see the lecturer was made very 
evident by the applause which broke out when the time for his 
appearance arrived, and which was kept up intermittently till 
he stepped on to the platform, preceded by the mayor, who 
acted as chairman. 

' ' The ovation which he received when he came forward to 
deliver his lecture was remarkable ; not content with clapping, 
the people rose to their feet and cheered him vociferously. 
His massive face impresses on one at first the idea of physical 
strength, but his piercing eyes brighten with his oration, and 
display the wonderful power and poetic fire of his mind. He 
opened his lecture in a calm, deliberate manner, as though 
feeling his way; but once started, his utterances gathered force 
and earnestness, until his voice rang through the building." 

The Western Mail was equally enthusiastic in its 
comments. 



48 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

The following morning the Cardiff ministers gave 
Mr. Beecher a reception at Angel Hotel. The Eev. W. 
Morris, in introducing him, explained to Mr. Beecher 
that they came to pay respect to one whose power and 
courage, even while holding what were generally thought 
to be unorthodox views, they had always admired. Mr. 
Beecher in reply gave a brief sketch of his life, and 
ascribed the tenor of his views largely to the influence 
exerted upon him by the writings of the Eev. Eobert 
Hall. His freedom from acerbity in his work, he thought, 
was due to his excellent health and perfect liver. After 
further remarks of a familiar and personal nature which 
seemed to greatly interest his listeners, a vote of thanks 
was proposed by the Eev. W. Morris of Cardiff, seconded 
by the Eev. W. Humphreys of America, and carried. 

Thursday evening, July 22d, the fourth lecture was 
given, in Albert Hall, at Swansea, Wales. The Daily 
Leader of that city says : 

" The doors of Albert Hall were thrown open an hour pre- 
vious to the commencement of the meeting ; by 8 o'clock in 
the evening all the seats were filled, not only by Swansea 
people, but from those who had gathered from a distance to 
hear, for once, one of America's most gifted sons." 

(Here follow two columns of editorial comment.) 

His fifth and concluding lecture of this week took 
place at Finsbury Chapel, London, memorable in Eng- 
land by a series of revival meetings under the preaching 
of Eev. Dr. Charles Gr. Einney (late President of Oberlin 
College) some thirty-five years ago, where Mr. Beecher's 
audience was large and enthusiastic, the lecture being a 
repetition of his first one in London. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 49 

The next week, July 26th to 30th, inclusive, the 
lectures were at Westbourne Park Chapel, London, 
West Croydon, Nottingham, Hanley, and Preston. They 
were less largely attended than those of the first week, 
only because the auditoriums were smaller; the rooms 
were packed. 

After resting Saturday and Sunday at the English 
Lakes, Mr. Beecher resumed his lectures at Birmingham 
August 3d, lectured at Sheffield August 4th, and again 
at Exeter Hall, London, August 5th, on the "Wastes 
and Burdens of Society." Then at the famous watering- 
place, Harrowgate, on the 6th; here Mr. Beecher 
rested on Saturday, the 7th. In the evening he reached 
Bradford, prepared to preach on the following day. On 
Monday, the • 9th, he lectured in Bradford, in St. 
George's Hall. This hall, seating four thousand people, 
was crowded to its utmost capacity. The platform was 
occupied by clergymen and ministers of all denomina- 
tions. The lecture occupied more than two hours in 
delivery, and the enthusiasm was a repetition of Exeter 
Hall, Bristol, and South Wales. It was the same way 
at Leeds, Dewsbury, Hull, and Manchester, Aug. 13th. 

He lectured in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. 
No more enthusiastic audience had he met in England 
than here. The Manchester Guardian said: 

1 ' Mr. Beecher could have nothing to complain of as to the 
quality of the greeting he received at Free Trade Hall. His 
most democratic sentiments were received with sympathy 
and approbation. It was a splendid audience that he ad- 
dressed. 

" The occupants of the platform were for the most partDis- 
senting ministers, but a few Established Churchmen had also 
responded to the invitation. Mr. William Birch, Jr., pre- 
4 



50 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

sided. Before taking the chair he led to the front seats Mrs. 
Beecher. A burst of applause greeted the lecturer when he 
appeared on the platform. His commanding presence at once 
claimed attention. The chairman well described him as a 
'rock, a sturdy, manly rock.' The Rev. Henry Ward 
Beecher is seventy-three years of age ; but his demeanor and 
eloquence are those of a man twenty years younger. Long 
white hair falls over his neck, and yet it only adds a pictur- 
esque touch to the intellectual strength of his features and the 
robust figure of his frame. When he rose to speak, he justi- 
fied the chairman's description, and stood immovable during 
the moments that the cheering lasted. As it was his first 
lecture in Manchester, preconceived ideas of his eloquence 
probably existed, and many persons were no doubt disap- 
pointed, and at the same time pleasantly surprised. Those 
who expected to be thrilled by all the attributes of the ideal 
orator were wrong in their estimate, but Mr. Beecher's style 
had compensating charms. It was the quiet, easy flow of ideas, 
expressed with extreme simplicity and constantly illustrated 
with a play of humor and good-natured sarcasm that was 
irresistible. Mr. Beecher said : 

" ' I have been here before, and the associations of this hall 
will, I trust, be a sufficient apology for my making a few in- 
troductory remarks before I begin the lecture itself. In 
October next it will be twenty-three years since I was in- 
troduced in this place and on this platform to an audience 
made up of I knew not what. But I found out what.' The 
audience laughed at this reference to the opposing elements 
which the speaker had to encounter on his former visit. It 
was at a time, he proceeded, when the affairs of his coun- 
try were at a crisis. Three years had elapsed since the battle 
was joined between the North and South. Vicksburg had 
fallen under the military conduct of General Grant, and Meade 
at Gettysburg had defeated Lee and driven him back across 
the Potomac. At that time a great struggle was being made 
to persuade the English people to take sides with the South, 
to procure a recognition of belligerent rights from the Parlia- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 51 

ment, and it was esteemed a matter of great importance that 
this should not be done. Over-excited, much worn by all the 
preliminary years of discussion and debate in his own country, 
he came to spend a summer of rest in Europe, and he was not 
good-natured with England. He felt that she had been gird- 
ing at Americans on the subject of slavery, and when at last 
in the providence of God they had taken up a position that 
must eventuate in emancipation, he found, substantially, Eng- 
land against them, or cold. Allow him to make one single 
heroic exception — the spinners and weavers of Lancashire. 
There were few spots in history where it would be more proper 
to erect a monument than to the memory of the humble 
laborers in this region round about, who by the cotton famine 
were well-nigh brought to domestic famine themselves, but 
who refused to give their allegiance to slavery and the South. 
At that time it was his duty, most reluctantly assumed, to 
endeavor to explain to English audiences, first in Manchester, 
then in Glasgow, then in Edinburgh, next at Liverpool, and 
finally in London, the facts in regard to the great struggle 
going on in America ; and in looking back te that period and 
at the position which he took in those several tumultuous ad- 
dresses, — ' You making the noise and I making the addresses,' 
he added, — it was a great pleasure to him to be able to assure 
his hearers that every single substantial sentiment that was 
set forth in those several popular addresses had now become 
history. The audiences he then addressed were not misled in 
a single instance. The war established the fact that the 
North in wealth, in population, in patriotism, in determina- 
tion was ahead of the South ; and although the Southern 
people were as brave a people as ever lived, although they 
manifested their faith in their own cause by the sacrifice of 
their first-born, decimating their population and absolutely 
squandering the wealth of the South before, exhausted and 
breathless, they would give in, yet they were overcome, and 
in the track of war came emancipation. And now on that 
point allow him to say, concerning the conduct of the South 
since the war, that, considering how many millions of men 



52 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

there were, and that their children had been slaughtered in 
such numbers, and that their slaves had been emancipated, 
and that they were universally reduced to poverty, and that 
the slaves were raised to the rank of citizens with a vote, and 
that in many of the Southern States the black vote overcame 
the white vote, and the legislatures were really in hands of the 
men who a few months before were their boughten and solden 
slaves, — the conduct of the South, taking it and measuring it 
by ordinary standards of human nature, had been worthy of 
admiration and praise. With here and there exceptions, they 
had submitted and were back again in the Union, not now by 
coercion, but by the heartiest good- will and choice. He had 
travelled within two or three years in every Southern slave- 
holding State. He had addressed the people in their largest 
halls, and he had put the question to them as plainly as possi- 
ble, ' Would you have slavery back again if you could have 
your choice ? ' and he had never any other response than 
this, ' We are thankful that slavery is at an end. ' A few 
words in praise of the conduct of the negroes at the time 
of the war, and indications of their progress since, were also 
offered, and Mr. Beecher proceeded with his lecture. It is 
needless to say that Mr. Beecher is an accomplished and 
powerful speaker. He kept the attention of his audience for 
an hour and a half, alternately stirring their passions, excit- 
ing laughter, or awakening the tenderest feelings." 

From Manchester to Liverpool, and Saturday was 
Mr. Beecher's day of rest. He and Mrs. Beecher visited 
the exposition, and walked about the business streets, 
gazing into shop -windows like two children, occasion- 
ally stepping in to purchase some article that attracted 
their attention. 

Mr. Beecher preached the next morning in Kirkdale 
Wesleyan Chapel, Liverpool. The day was excessively 
hot, but that did not appear to detract from the inter- 
est with which the great congregation listened. There 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 53 

was the usual rush for admittance at an early hour, and 
the great disappointed crowd who were unable to gain 
admission lingered in the burning sun until after the 
services were over, in order to get at least a glimpse of 
the famous preacher. 

He lectured in Hengler's Circus the following even- 
ing, August 16th. I quote from the Liverpool Mercury 
of August 17th a portion of a two-column article, 
"Henry Ward Beecher on the Platform:" 

"Last night, at Hengler's Circus, Mr. Beecher appeared as 
a platform orator. He was seen as it were in the open, with 
full license and freedom to roam, untrammelled by the sur- 
roundings of a Sunday congregation, and restricted by none 
of the sanctity of the pulpit. We are bound to confess that 
his style on the platform differed from his style in the pulpit 
only in proportion to the area of the buildings in which he 
spoke. Mr. Beecher is nothing if he is not natural, and he 
appears to be altogether too much a child of nature to be 
capable of any appreciable degree of alteration. His style is, 
as we said yesterday, essentially the style of the platform ; and 
therefore, regarded as a pulpit orator, he must be viewed in a 
different aspect. In the latter, conventional restraint and 
common custom are potent factors. In the pulpit, a man 
must conform to the fashion of the country, or, even if he 
has the wisdom of Solon, he will come under the lash of 
criticism. No man without genius dare speak in the pulpit 
as Mr. Beecher does; but the very originality which might 
brand him in the pulpit may make his reputation on the plat- 
form. The latter is necessarily a far higher test than the 
former, as, in the pulpit, men of little brains and men of 
much meet on the common ground of conformity, accepted 
cadences of voice, gesture of limb, and almost of expression 
of countenance. 

"A substantial audience assembled last night at the Circus 
to hear Mr. Beecher, a large body of representative clergy- 



54 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

men and laymen of the Wesleyan denomination being present 
on the platform. Mr. Councillor Warrington presided, and 
introduced Mr. Beecher as an orator whose fame had ex- 
tended throughout the civilized world." 



The Liverpool Daily Courier of the same date said: 

"There were about three thousand people in Hengler's 
Circus last night to hear the Kev. Henry Ward Beecher's 
lecture on ' The Eeign of the Common People. ' Councillor 
Warrington presided, and on the platform were a large num- 
ber of ministers, the majority of whom belonged to the Non- 
conformist bodies in this city. The chairman judiciously 
confined his remarks to a few sentences, in which he spoke of 
the increasingly cordial relations between this country and 
America. It was with an indorsement of this remark that 
Mr. Beecher, whose reception must have been very gratify- 
ing to him, began his lecture, and at once his characteristic 
style manifested itself in the statement that the relations 
between those two countries had not always been those of a 
child and her mother, but that it had seemed at times as if 
England had been a stepmother." 

(A synopsis of two columns of the lecture followed. ) 



From Liverpool we went to the ancient city of Chester. 

Here I may quote extracts from another letter of Mr. 
Beecher's. He was now in full course, lecturing and 
preaching, seeing with delight the charming country 
and receiving with joy the hearty English welcomes on 
every side; yet there is one little passage in this letter 
which comes out so simply, and shows how naturally he 
looked forward to the rest that death would bring him, 
that it is at once pathetic and comforting to those who 
loved him: 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 55 

" Chester, England, Aug. 17, 1886. 

" My dear Friend: We left Liverpool this a.m., where we 
spent Sunday and Monday, some accounts of which you will 

find in newspapers which we send to you and C . It was 

a successful visit, an enthusiastic audience, both on Sunday 
and Monday night. 

"We dropped down here early this [Tuesday] a.m., and have 
very pleasant rooms for two days at the Grosvenor Hotel — 
that being the family name of the Duke of Westminster, 
whose place at Euston we rode out to and inspected to-day. 
The family left yesterday, so that we had the run of the house, 
and I saw many beautiful things. Mother was delighted. We 
came back in time to visit the Cathedral before dark. The 
care-taker was very polite, and showed us much attention and 
gave us much interesting information. The visit brought up 
the memory of my old friend John Eaymond. It was our first 
visit after landing at Liverpool,* and you will recall his letters 
and their enthusiasm. It was one of my vision-seeing days, 
and the place was full of him, and brought together the wide- 
apart years. To-morrow I shall lecture here, then dash across 
to York, then back again to Carnarvon, not far from Holly- 
head, and on Sunday preach at Carlisle. 

"My Sundays have been profitable, and I have enjoyed 
preaching and tokens of favor very wide- spread and affecting. 
I find myself far more read in England than in my own coun- 
try, where my mission seems well-nigh over. The Christian 
World newspaper, which has for years printed my American 
sermons, now sends a shorthand writer everywhere to report 
my sermons, and they are printed in the Christian World 
Pulpit. Mr. Clark, the editor, told Pond that the Pulpit 
had more than doubled its circulation since my English ser- 
mons began to appear. I find a great breaking-up among the 
younger ministers of all denominations, and they are glad to 
follow a path-maker through the tangle of modern science. 

* Alluding to his visit in 1863 in company with Dr. John H. 
Raymond, the president of Vassar College, since deceased. 



56 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

' ' The Parkers left London on the same week that we did. We 
met them again for three days at Lake Windermere, and since 
then they have been in Scotland. I hope to see them again; 
but I want to come home. I should be glad to sail to-morrow. 
I have wandered enough, for I am kept very busy; yet I never 
was in better health and vigor, and am doing my work easily. 
I do not think that I shall come back jaded, yet, my friend, I 
long every year to lay down my task and depart. It is not a 
judgment, formed on reasonable grounds; it is simply a quiet 
longing of the spirit, a brooding desire to be through with my 
work, — although I am willing to go on if need be. 

" Thursday, 19th. I go to-day across all England to York, 
and shall see the Cathedral there. I have not had a single 
experience of exaltation under Cathedral music, such as I had 
with John Raymond. Is the music tame, or am I more used 
to it, or are my susceptibilities growing dull with advancing 
years ? All, I think. ... I visited yesterday a Quaker meet- 
ing-house where William Penn once preached. The chapel 
yet stands here where Matthew Henry, the famous commen- 
tator, once preached, though it is now a Unitarian church; it 
stands on Trinity Street. I also visited the oldest church here, 
founded about a.d. 600. Saxon architecture' at the bottom; 
the second tier above, transition Norman ; and the clere-story, 
early English Gothic. The priory, now in ruins, was held 
either by De Quincey himself or his family; and here he wrote 
much of his famous book. ..." 

From Chester, as indicated in the above letter, we 
sped away to York and Carnarvon (Wales), Mr. Beecher 
speaking every night with the accustomed demonstra- 
tions, preaching in Carlisle for his friend, Eev. John 
Adams. He lectured in the same place on the Monday 
evening following (August 23d). The lecture was in the 
Drill Shed, there being no other public hall capable of 
accommodating the great crowd. 

In Carlisle Mr. Beecher reserved five days for rest, 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 57 

visited the Moffatt Hydropathic Establishment with a 
number of friends from America and Scotland, and re- 
mained until the following Saturday, arriving at Glas- 
gow and preaching in that city on Sunday, August 
29th, for Eev. Albert Goodrich, in the Elgin Place 
Congregational Church. 

If there was any fear that his bold utterances would 
prove too strong for the orthodox Scotchmen, his recep- 
tion by this first Scottish audience must have sufficed to 
dispel it. It reminded one of his first appearance at the 
City Temple, London. There was the same crowd out- 
side long before the doors were open, the same filling-up 
of seats by fortunate ticket-holders, the same rush when 
the general public was admitted, the same crowding and 
squeezing to find sitting or standing room. There was 
also the same eager expectancy when Mr. Beecher en- 
tered the pulpit, and a not less earnest and attractive 
listening to the utterances of the preacher. Mr. Beecher, 
recruited by his brief vacation, appeared in excellent 
health, and he spoke in his best style, abating no jot or 
tittle of his catholic views in deference to the supposed 
orthodox susceptibilities of a northern congregation. 
His hearers were sympathetic and responsive, and the 
readiness with which his quaint humor and his broad 
theology were received, the unsuppressed laughter which 
now and then greeted his sayings, and the actual ap- 
plause of the listeners when he expressed his desire to 
add a few more words to an already long discourse, were 
clear indications that among Scotch Congregationalists, 
at least, Mr. Beecher had found a hearty welcome. 

On the next evening he lectured for the first time 
since his earlier visit in Scotland in St. Andrew's Hall. 
Dr. Blackie, the Lord Dean of Guild, presided, and the 



58 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

lecturer was accompanied to the platform by Eev. Al- 
bert Goodrich, Eev. Dr. Parker, Bailie Dickson, Messrs. 
Peter McLeod, John Wilson, John Muir, Leonard Grow, 
Gilbert Geith, and others. The Glasgow Herald of Au- 
gust 31st says: 

' ' The hall was filled when Mr. Beeeher arrived, and he was 
received with prolonged applause. He began with a brief 
reference to his visit to Glasgow twenty-three years ago. 
Proceeding, he said:" 

(Here follows a two-column report of the lecture.) 

The Scotsman' of the same date says: 

' ' Last evening, at St. Andrew's Hall, Mr. Beeeher delivered 
his lecture on ' The Keign of the Common People ' to an 
audience of about three thousand persons, presided over by 
Dr. Blackie, Lord Dean of Guild. " 

(Here follows a verbatim report of the lecture.) 

The following morning Mr. and Mrs. Beeeher were 
given a breakfast, and invited to meet some fifty or 
sixty members of Baptist, Congregational, and Evangel- 
ical Union churches in Glasgow, full proceedings of 
which are given in "His Eeception at Glasgow. " 

From Glasgow to Greenock, August 31st. The 
Greenock Herald heads a column article thus: 

1 ' Henry Ward Beeeher in the Town Hall was an event in 
the lives of those who heard him. He had an excellent audi- 
ence, and a hearty welcome." 

Prom Greenock to Dundee, Wednesday, September 
1st. I quote the Dundee Advertiser : 

"Last night the Bev. Henry Ward Beeeher delivered one 
of his popular lectures to an audience which completely filled 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 59 

Kinnaird Hall. Ex-Provost Moncur presided, and amongst 
those on the platform were the Rev. Dr. Short, the Rev. 
Messrs. Stewart Golloway, Houston, Dunlop, D. M. Ross, 
Cook, John Wylie, Masson, T. S. Dickson, J. Wilson, John 
Reid, J. George, W. J. Cox, R. Lowrie, W. Hamilton, Miller 
(Newgigging), White (Blairgowrie), Dakin (Kingstanly), 
Gloucestershire, Morrison (Caversham, Oxford), Professor 
Gilray, Mr. Frank Henderson, ex-M.P. ; ex-Bailie Robertson, 
ex-Bailie C. V. Maxwell, Mr. J. L. Cunningham, Mr. R. A 
Miller, Mr. James Logie, Mr. John Robertson (Taymount), 
Mr. W. Chalmers, Mr. J. P. Smith, Mr. Mclntyre, U. S. Vice- 
Consul, etc. 

" Ex-Provost Moncur said he had much pleasure in presiding 
at this meeting, and in introducing to a Dundee audience one 
of the most distinguished living Americans, the Rev. Henry 
Ward Beecher. [Applause.] He need not tell them that Mr. 
Beecher was the son of a noble father, and that he was a 
member of a distinguished family, and he need not tell them 
that he had by his genius and by his sparkling eloquence, by 
his noble and patriotic philanthropic labors, added lustre to 
the family name. [Applause.] They could not but honor 
the man who in conjunction with his illustrious sister — [Ap- 
plause]— fought such a glorious fight in behalf of the op- 
pressed slaves — [Applause] — when to advocate the abolition of 
slavery was a very dangerous thing. [Applause.] Such 
names as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Lloyd 
Garrison, and Henry Ward Beecher would be forever identi- 
fied with that glorious struggle which resulted in the complete 
emancipation of the American slave. [Applause.] It was 
quite true that some of them might not be of one mind with 
Mr. Beecher in regard to various matters, political and relig- 
ious. He, for one, preferred the theology of Mr. Beecher's 
father to his own — [Laughter] — but that did not prevent him 
from honoring one whose splendid gifts and abundant labors 
in behalf of the country and humanity made him worthy of 
the esteem and admiration of all right-thinking people. [Ap- 
plause.] 



60 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

"Mr. Beech er, who was loudly applauded on rising to his 
feet, began by saying it was far from his intention to dispute 
any man's taste— [Laughter]— and although his honored 
friend who so kindly introduced him had expressed a prefer- 
ence for his father's theology over his own, he might be al- 
lowed — to borrow a figure — to say that he might go farther 
and fare worse. [Laughter and applause.] In regard to 
mere personal and historical allusions, he wished to say that 
it had been his good fortune from his boyhood that he had 
never been left to choose his own rather than the will of God 
in the matter of the poor, the needy, and the suffering — [Hear, 
hear!] — and that he had lived long enough to find that he 
who joined himself to his own race for their weal and upris- 
ing joined himself to God.. [Applause.] It was also a mat- 
ter of gratification to him that from long familiarity with the 
wants of the recently enslaved, and with all those great 
movements which effected their emancipation, he did not 
doubt that the work had been done completely and done 
well. The colored people behaved, both during their term 
of slavery and during the great war for their emanci- 
pation, and since, in a manner that should make their 
name illustrious in history. Though they had made" many 
mistakes and had been often misled, yet on the whole 
it might be said that the colored people in the South 
voted more wisely and more humanely than their masters 
before the emancipation [Cheers.] The people of the South, 
he was proud to say, had come to the Union with a loyalty 
that was unsuspected. They had accepted their places again 
in the ranks of the nation, and were working with the North, 
under the Stars and Stripes, to bring in the great day of the 
Lord on their continent. [Applause.] He had been led to 
think that great as their loss was during the war, many as 
their sorrows were, freely as the blood flowed through all their 
cities and villages, the benefits which had accrued from the 
war had been innumerable. They had paid a great price, but 
they had bought their present condition cheaply — cheaply with 
all the loss." 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 61 

After these preliminary words he proceeded with the 
lecture. 

The allusion by the chairman to the uncertainty of 
his father's son's theology aroused Mr. Beecher and 
caused him to deviate somewhat from the subject of 
the lecture-. Surrounded on the platform by a score or 
more of conservative gray-haired Scotch ministers, he 
took occasion to handle Calvinism less tenderly than 
usual, and to open up his idea of a living Christianity 
and a consistent religion. 

Never, during my acquaintance with him, have I 
known Mr. Beecher to rise more inspiringly to the im- 
portance and the earnestness of his own belief, and a 
determination to so impress it upon that audience that 
it should never be forgotten. 

The lecture was that one which I had heard so often, 
" The Reign of the Common People." I stood listening 
from the beginning to the close, yet I could not see that 
he once repeated a sentence or a thought that he had 
ever spoken before on that subject. It was a grand 
appeal to his Christian brethren to be more liberal and 
to think better of the religion of Jesus Christ, which he 
believed to be the true rule of life and the essential 
principal of vital growth and power, as well in the mass 
as in the individual. If I remember aright, there were 
some thirty clergymen and ministers present. 

It was announced by the chairman that Mr. and Mrs. 
Beecher would remain in the lower hall to extend a hand 
of welcome and good-fellowship to those who might de- 
sire to meet them personally. The entire audience rushed 
to the lower hall, and for a long time the ushers, hall- 
keepers, and committee of arrangements endeavored to 
impress on the people that they "must give way and allow 



62 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

those who so desired to meet Mr. and Mrs. Beecher." 
The congregation being all of one accord in so desiring, 
naturally the committee's efforts were fruitless, and Mr. 
and Mrs. Beecher were obliged to leave the hall and 
forego the pleasure that had been arranged for them. 

The next day we went to Aberdeen, where Mr. Beecher 
was announced for two lectures ; these concluded the 
week's work. Many know how beautiful the ride is 
through Scotland from Dundee to Aberdeen, by way 
of the Caledonian Eailway, early in September, with its 
bordering fields of pasture, meadow, and grain, — the 
grain golden-ripe, and the harvesters industriously 
gathering it in. No land that I know of is worked so 
nearly to its fullest capacity for the production of the 
necessaries of life. One acre of Scotch land is made to 
produce more than any four acres I ever saw in my own 
country. 

Mr. Beecher declared it one of the most enjoyable 
journeys he ever made. We had our special car and two 
accompanying friends from London, and it was a general 
remark that no part of the world could be more beauti- 
ful on a 2d of September than this. Our English 
friends were somewhat of the Tory order of thinking ; 
they were told by Mr. Beecher that " there should be no 
reason why Ireland should not be just as prosperous as 
this ; it has the same facilities." 

"Ah!" they replied, "you can see the reason. A 
Scotchman will work and an Irishman will not." 

" Give the Irishman a chance," said Mr. Beecher ; 
"you don't give him a fair chance !" He urged this 
upon them. 

The granite city of Aberdeen, built and paved in 
gray granite, is, I think, the cleanest city in the world. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 63 

Buildings that have stood three hundred years look as 
fresh and new as those but a few years old. Here we 
were made comfortable in the Queen's Hotel. Drawing- 
rooms and bedrooms were found profusely adorned 
with floral offerings, assuring us we were not among 
strangers. 

Mr. Beecher lectured in Music Hall, the largest pub- 
lic hall in Northern Scotland. The audience was very 
large. Eev. 0. C. Macdonald occupied the chair, and 
was supported on the platform by some fifteen clergy- 
men from the Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, 
and other churches, including the Church of England. 
Other clergymen were present in the body of the hall, 
and among the occupants of the gallery seats was Mr. 
Alexander Bain, Lord Eector of the University. 

The chairman said he had the honor of introducing the 
prince of American preachers — [Applause] — and one of the 
most influential directors of public opinion and feeling in the 
United States. [Applause.] Mr. Beecher was a product of 
the life of the New World. He was a representative, he thought 
he might say, of the best characteristics of that life. [Applause. ] 
As a religious teacher — and it was in this capacity that he 
knew him best — Mr. Beecher had shown in all his works an 
ardent love of freedom of thought. But that freedom had 
never tended towards license. [Applause.] There was in Mr. 
Beecher a devout religious spirit which had regulated that love 
of freedom and had made him one of the ablest and most 
popular exponents of the thoughts and aims of the Founder of 
our religion. [Applause.] There was in him a happy and in- 
fluential union of intellect and emotion, of force and feeling, 
which he thought helped us to understand his supremacy in 
the pulpit. [Applause.] Then, he was progressive. Mr. Beecher, 
he was satisfied from his writings, had not yet stopped grow- 
ing. He had not accepted, and he did not claim to have 



64 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

formulated for himself, a complete system of theology. [Ap- 
plause.] In his life-thoughts there stood revealed to us a 
man watching at the gates of celestial wisdom, waiting at the 
posts of her doors. [Applause.] As a citizen of the great 
Republic — [Applause] — which was now slowly working its way 
towards the realization of the grand ideal to its claim to inde- 
pendence, Mr. Beecher's voice has ever been clearly raised on 
the side of public purity, honor, and justice. [Applause.] 
They welcomed Mr. Beecher kindly for his own sake — [Ap- 
plause] — and he ventured to say that they added to that wel- 
come the deep interest they felt in, and the love that they bore 
towards, a people of whom it was now their pride to think 
that they owe to the mother-land some at least of those great 
virtues in which their fathers laid the foundation of a free 
state, and in which they themselves, by their capacity for self- 
rule, vindicate to this hour the claim, after barely a century 
of life, to stand abreast of the most advanced civilization of 
Christendom. [Applause. ] 

Mr. Beecher, who was received with cheers, rose and 
at once proceeded with his lecture, which was frequently 
interrupted by applause and laughter. A verbatim re- 
port was given in the Aberdeen Daily Free Press and 
in the Aberdeen Journal. 

The second lecture in Aberdeen was, if possible, more 
successful than the first. 

We bade farewell to bonny Aberdeen on Saturday, 
September 4th. Mr. Beecher had consented to stop 
over an hour at Stirling and take part in the inaugura- 
tion, at the Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig of 
Stirling, of the bust of Eobert Burns, the gift of Mr. 
Carnegie of New York. Mr. Beecher was expected to 
give expression to the wide-spread and intense feeling 
of admiration with which the national poet of Scotland 
was regarded by the people of America, 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 65 

An enormous crowd had assembled in honor of the 
occasion; and the fact that so distinguished a person as 
Mr. Beecher was to deliver the oration had brought ex- 
cursion-trains from Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, and Edin- 
burgh. Unfortunately, for the first time since his arri- 
val in England, Mr. Beecher had a severe cold and 
hoarseness, and as he was to deliver the anniversary ser- 
mon at the Evangelical Union Congregational Church 
(Eev. Robert Craig, A.M., pastor) in Edinburgh, the 
following day (Sabbath), he was obliged to cancel this 
promise and disappoint the many thousands at Stir- 
ling. Much as Mr. Beecher was grieved whenever he 
was compelled to break an engagement, I have never 
known him to show his disappointment except on this 
occasion. He generally banished the matter from his 
mind at once after deciding. But here he could not. 
He afterwards said to me: 

" I believe one of the best speeches that ever was in 
me has never come out ; it was for that Burns cen- 
tennial/' 

The night's rest at Hotel Royal in Edinburgh par- 
tially drove away the cold, and he preached a great ser- 
mon. He used to say, when he had a cold that caused 
hoarseness: 

" Let Sunday come, and I will blow a sermon through 
it. That will cure it." 

The church was crowded. The singing was by the con- 
gregation, as Mr. Beecher liked it to be. The people 
were in full sympathy with the preacher, and the serv- 
ice must long be remembered in Edinburgh. 

The Monday following he lectured in United Presby- 
terian Synod Hall, a room historical in Presbyterianism. 
It was beautifully decorated with flowers, and when 
5 



66 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

filled with a Scotch audience was one of the finest spec- 
tacles I ever beheld. The Lord Provost presided, and 
the large platform was completely occupied by ministers 
and men of distinction. 

Mr. Beecher had not enjoyed the best of health while 
in Edinburgh. The Scotch mist lay so heavy that it 
was impossible to see across the streets. The air was 
rough and chilly, and he and Mrs. Beecher were de- 
prived of viewing to advantage the most picturesque 
city in Great Britain. But they did visit the Castle, 
Holyrood Palace, John Knox's grave, and the "poor 
quarters." 

The next lecture was in England, at Newcastle-on- 
Tyne. When we crossed the line from Scotland into 
England the sun was out and the clouds had rolled 
away. 

" Mother," he said to Mrs. Beecher, " we are in Eng- 
land. Don't you see the clouds have cleared away?" 

"Is it because we are in England?" asked Mrs. 
Beecher. 

" What else can it be ?" he inquired. 

Mrs. Beecher is a matter-of-fact woman; and although 
she delighted in her husband's jokes, she generally took 
them apparently in earnest. 

At Newcastle we found an abundant welcome. The 
daily newspapers had heralded Mr. Beecher's coming 
with a great deal of earnest enthusiasm, and during our 
entire tour of England we did not find a place where 
the newspapers expressed more cordial appreciation. 
The Daily Chronicle devoted several columns to a review 
of his visit to England in 1863. For Mr. Beecher's 
friends at home I must quote briefly, at least, from one 
of the leading editorials : 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 67 

"Each successive season seems to draw closer the bonds 
that connect the English-speaking nations throughout the 
world. Steam has bridged the Atlantic, and the passage to 
and fro of the citizens of America and England is so common 
that it has almost ceased to be noteworthy. Only the other 
day, after a brief sojourn, Oliver Wendell Holmes returned to 
the land of his nativity, carrying with him the sunniest memo- 
ries of the old country. Probably no more grateful com- 
pliment was ever paid to England than when the ' Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table ' said : 



One half her dust has walked the rest, 
In martyrs, heroes, poets, sages.' 



Since the fall of the pro-slavery power which created so much 
unhappiness in the world, there has been a gradual drawing 
together of what Milton called the parent and daughter Em- 
pires. On every fitting occasion the Queen has shown her 
sympathy with the United States. Even the Centenary of 
American Independence was so celebrated that it served to 
cement the friendship of the two nations. It has twice been 
our sovereign's sad self-imposed duty to send letters of condo- 
lence over martyred presidents of the American Union. 

"To-morrow night we are to have amongst us a distin- 
guished citizen of that great Kepublic. Henry Ward Beech- 
er's name is naturalized in England. He is known as the 
pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, and as editor or con- 
tributor to some of the most influential religious papers in the 
United States. Those who were familiar with the New York 
Independent under his editorship remember its power. But 
while he has given not a little of his strength to journalism, 
it is as a preacher and a lecturer that the pastor of Brooklyn 
Church has made himself famous. ... As a preacher, the 
American theologian is animated in the highest degree. Truth 
is presented by him, not in the abstract, but in concrete forms. 
He thinks in metaphor. On the platform he has dealt with 
many topics of vital interest to the community. His visit to 



68 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

England in the crisis of the great war between North and 
South powerfully contributed to undeceive our countrymen as 
to the issues at stake in that battle of giants. . . . 

" When Henry Ward Beecher appeared in the chief cities of 
England and Scotland to uphold the Union and support eman- 
cipation, there was considerable diversity of opinion as to the 
merits of the struggle, even beyond that section of the popu- 
lation which favored Southern independence. In Liverpool 
especially Mr. Beecher had a formidable task. That city was 
then a stronghold of the slave power. The seizure of the 
rams had created an excitement which exhibited itself in pro- 
nounced antagonism to the orator. Nevertheless he triumphed. 
If, on a superficial view, circumstances seemed adverse, there 
was not a little that contributed to place him on a vantage- 
ground. He was the brother of the authoress of ' Uncle 
Tom's Cabin,' a work which enjoys with Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's 
Progress,' and the ' Imitation of Christ ' by Thomas a Kempis, 
the renown of having been translated into every language of 
Europe. When Henry Ward Beecher appeared in England 
' Uncle Tom ' had touched all hearts. Since its publication, 
moreover, there had died in America a confessor of the an- 
cient, silent order, who, if he did not write, could act for 
humanity. John Brown was hung for essaying to liberate 
Virginia's slaves, but even those who detested all war assigned 
the martyr's aureole to the hero of Harper's Ferry. Henry 
Ward Beecher, being thoroughly familiar with every phase of 
the anti-slavery controversy, was well able to expose the 
sophistry of Slidell, Mason, and Spence. To-day he is amongst 
us on a different errand. It is no longer a great international 
controversy of which he is the exponent. He will speak to- 
morrow night as the representative of our kin beyond the sea, 
and will doubtless receive from the citizens of Newcastle a 
welcome worthy of his prestige." 

Here we met Dr. Parker and his wife, who were spend- 
ing their vacation at Sunderland, ten miles south of 
Newcastle, Mrs. Parker's former home. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 69 

The lecture was given in Town Hall, which seats 
three thousand five hundred people. Mr. Arthur Coote 
presided, supported on the platform by Rev. Dr. Parker, 
J. 0. Cuthbertson, A. May, Dr. J. H. Rutherford, and 
numerous others. 

The Newcastle Daily Leader on the following Mon- 
day reported the lecture in full. It said, editorially: 

' ' The story which the great American divine had to tell the 
citizens of Newcastle last night was not a new one, and was 
unlike the thrilling advocacy of ' freedom for the slave ' with 
which he claimed English sympathy twenty-three years ago. 
There were many ministers present, no doubt in the expecta- 
tion of getting some ' light and leading ' from the famous 
preacher, who received a very gratifying reception, the Kentish 
fire being extinguished by a round of Northumbrian cheers. 
The reverend gentleman has a right reverend appearance, 
although he apparently discards anything like clerical attire ; 
but bearing his more than 'threescore years and ten' with 
healthy grace, his flowing white hair, large, open, clean-shaven 
features, and robust presence, make one think somehow of the 
' Pilgrim Fathers,' of whom he might be a stout representa- 
tive, and when carried away by the fervor of his thoughts, the 
intellectuality of his features assumes the Wesley-Bunyan type. 
The mobility of the reverend pastor's physiognomy is of some 
account, as he does not hesitate to do a little mimicry both 
with voice and features, and he has a knack of concluding 
even a serious thought by a 'happy expression' at once 
amusing and effective. 

' ' The chairman at last night's meeting, Mr. Arthur Coote, 
in a few well-chosen sentences flattered the American nation, 
and, by a happy turn, its well-known representative whom they 
had come to hear ; and acknowledge their appreciation of his 
successful and laborious efforts." 

The Daily Clironicle gave a verbatim report of the 



VO A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

lecture, and an editorial comment of a column which 
closed as follows : 

" With him love rather than justice is the burden of the 
message heard of old by the Sea of Galilee and on the slopes of 
Olivet. In the best sense of the word, Mr. Beecher is an 
original thinker, while nothing can surpass the appositeness of 
his illustrations. Twenty- three years have passed since he 
lectured in England, but last night it was impossible to detect 
any evidence of waning power. The eloquence, the humor, 
and the wisdom of his discourse left nothing to be desired. 
The orator is yet a learner, and that is the secret of his 
strength. There is nothing stereotyped about his thinking." 

From Newcastle we went to Sunderland. Mr. and 
Mrs. Beecher were the guests of Andrew Common, 
Esq., the father of Mrs. Parker. Dr. and Mrs. Parker 
were here to welcome their friends to the home of her 
girlhood. Mr. Beecher lectured in Victoria Hall. 

The chairman (Andrew Common, Esq.) said that last Sun- 
day week he heard Mr. Beecher preach in Glasgow. The 
preacher played upon his intellectual and emotional nature 
like a skilled musician playing on an instrument of which he 
had complete command. He cried, smiled, laughed. He was 
charmed and thrilled, softened, subdued and humbled, and yet 
he was elevated to a spiritual altitude from which he could see 
things that had never before come within the range of his 
spiritual vision. [Applause. ] It was an inspiration, a new reve- 
lation. He had had the pleasure and the privilege of welcom- 
ing Mr. and Mrs. Beecher to his home as honored guests, and 
now, when he introduced Mr. Beecher, he should expect them 
to unite in according to him a thoroughly hearty Sunderland 
welcome — [Applause] — such a welcome as this go-ahead town 
knew how to give to a distinguished stranger — [Loud applause] 
— the eloquent lecturer, and perhaps the grandest preacher 
since the time of the Apostle Paul. [Applause.] 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 71 

Stockton-on-Tees was our next lecture-place. Mr. 
Beecher and I went early, leaving Dr. and Mrs. Parker, 
Mr. Common and Mrs. Beecher, to come to the lecture 
in the evening. The usual enthusiastic gathering was 
assembled ; the platform was crowded with clergymen, 
Mr. Joseph Dodd, M.P., presiding. The audience was 
very large. There were flowers in bouquets and baskets 
and on the platform and on the speaker's desk. 

The chairman in a few stirring words, that were 
received with repeated applause, introduced the lecturer. 

The lecture was warmly applauded. Mr. Beecher 
was at his best, and the audience in full sympathy with 
him. Mr. Eobert Cameron of Sunderland paid a high 
eulogy to his lecture. He said Mr. Beecher came with 
a good message from America to England, and was show- 
ing that we were one people, with one literature and one 
love of freedom. He was one of those men who were 
making the bonds between America and England closer 
day by day. 

Dr. Parker was called to his feet, and had to say some- 
thing ; he looked at me and said: 

" Major Pond, where do we lecture next ?" 

Such was the enthusiasm that this simple pleasantry 
brought uproarious applause and cheers. He then told 
his " friends and neighbors " that he knew Mr. Beecher 
not only as a lecturer but as a man. He knew him 
intimately in his private as well as in his public capa- 
city, and he was there to say that Mr. Beecher as a man 
immeasurably transcended Mr. Beecher as a lecturer. 
(Applause. ) 

All our party returned to Sunderland that night ; and 
as this was an hour before train-time, it was occupied 
in hand-shaking and visiting. 



72 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

" Pond, this is one of our best days/' said Mr. 
Beecher. 

" When do I receive my fee, Major Pond ?" asked 
Dr. Parker. 

It was on this occasion that Mr. Beecher said he never 
enjoyed speaking in his life more than to these English 
audiences. 

From Stockton-on-Tees we went to Gateshead (Sep- 
tember 10th) . This is really a part of Newcastle-on-Tyne, 
the two cities being separated by the river Tyne. Mr. 
Beecher had told me he should lecture on "Evolution" 
before leaving England ; and as he was speaking in a 
group of towns in North England, the people had a 
desire to hear him on all possible subjects ; so I took the 
liberty of announcing this subject. When Mr. Beecher 
ascertained that "Evolution" was announced/ he re- 
belled. He said he could not make the subject come to 
him as he wanted it, and he surely would not lecture on 
that subject in England until he could have one or two 
days to think about it. Eev. Dr. Eobb, the Congre- 
gational minister at Gateshead, was in sympathy with 
both Mr. Beecher and myself ; but he had announced 
the subject, and, not being to blame in the least for so 
doing, was at a loss how to satisfy his people. The 
tickets were sold ; the people must hear Mr. Beecher. 
The only way I could see, with my years of experience, 
was to let the audience assemble, and those who were not 
satisfied could have their money refunded. Mr. Beecher 
had helped me out of like difficulties before, and I 
believed he would now, although he had said nothing to 
that effect. 

The Town Hall was crowded. As the Newcastle 
Leader said : 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. *73 

"Mr. Beecher had the felicity of addressing a 'bumper' 
house at Gateshead. The same charges were in operation, but 
there was the old attraction of a new subject, ' Evolution and 
Religion,' which, although a seemingly less popular title than 
the ' Reign of the Common People,' had something in the way 
of a revelation about it from so distinguished a divine, and 
might help to settle the nebulous. Indeed, the audience had 
a revelation from the lecturer, but it was of a personal, not of 
a scientific or metaphysical, character." 

In company with Rev. Dr. Robb, the Mayor (who 
was to preside), and several ministers, I went npon the 
platform, feeling like a criminal about to hear his 
sentence. 

After introduction by the Mayor, who spoke kindly 
of the lecturer, Mr. Beecher stepped forward, looking 
fresh and solid, but with somewhat of an apologetic 
aspect. 

He said : It was not agreeable for a public speaker to com- 
mence his address with an explanation and apology, yet he 
was forced to do it that night, with the certainty that he should 
disappoint some of those who had come hither. He would 
preface his apology with a narration of a few items of his own 
life. He had been lecturing for forty years in his own country, 
but for the last twelve under the management of Major Pond. 
During that time they had travelled over nearly four hundred 
thousand miles; had been in every State, and almost in every 
Territory, of the United States, together. Now his occupation 
was such that he could not look after business, or have any- 
thing to do with it whatever. In consequence his arrange- 
ment was simply this: 

"He [pointing to Major Pond] hires me, and does with me 
as he has a mind to." [Laughter.] He [Mr. Beecher] was 
sublet — Major Pond took all the coin over a regular fee, and 
took all the losses. [Laughter.] He made all the arrange- 



Y4 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

ments with committees and in different towns — he [Mr. 
Beecher] had nothing but the voice. This business was far 
larger in his country than in England, for the system of 
lecturing in America had been so perfected as to have become 
a distinct institution amongst the efforts at popular education. 
In this long course he had made sometimes one, sometimes 
two, sometimes three new lectures in the year, until there 
were some twenty lectures on the docket. He never wrote 
them, and so the discussion of a subject assumed different 
forms in application to different wants in different places, but 
the titles remained the same although the contents varied al- 
most indefinitely. It had been Mr. Pond's habit to say to the 
committee of a community: " Here are the lectures which Mr. 
Beecher is giving this season," and sometimes recommended 
that he should be tried. After two or three years many of the 
lectures were dead. He [Mr. Beecher] had almost forgotten 
the plans of them, and very largely the outlines and subjects. 
Last Wednesday morning, after speaking in the adjoining 
village — [Loud laughter] — he was surprised and startled by 
seeing after a very kind account in one of the morning papers 
that he was to lecture on "Evolution and Eeligion." That 
was a subject very near to his heart, and was a subject on 
which he purposed to lecture in England some other time; but 
two years and more were gone by since he delivered it last, and 
the plan was almost in the air, scattered, and he [Mr. Beecher] 
instantly sought Major Pond, and told him he could not 
lecture on Evolution. The thing was not in his mind, he was 
suffering under a kind of influenza, and he could not take up 
that subject now. He thought he should lecture at Gateshead 
on " The Wastes and Burdens of Society." He heard that this 
lecture on "Evolution" had gone out, and that many would 
be coming to this assembly for the sake of hearing the discus- 
sion on the subject, and it troubled him very much. [Applause. ] 
After a day or two he found that nothing had been done, and 
then he became as severe as his mild nature would allow him 
to be — [Laughter] — with Mr. Pond. He found it was no fault of 
the committee that had the care and management of this lecture. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 75 

They had taken in good faith that which they had a right to 
take, and it was his protest. If there was any blame at all, it 
should be laid on Major Pond; and when they saw how large 
and broad he was [pointing to Major Pond] across the shoul- 
ders, and how capable of bearing it easily, he felt less scruple 
in saying it was the Major's fault, and not his, and not the 
committee's. He could only say that night that he should be 
very glad indeed to lecture on " Evolution and Keligion," but 
he could not. A man could not lecture on what he had not 
got in him. He believed he must lecture on ' ' The Wastes and 
Burdens of Society " or upon nothing, and he would take their 
judgment in that matter with great cheerfulness. He was 
also instructed by the committee to say that if there were any 
gentlemen who had come there on purpose to hear " Evolution 
and Religion " and were not content with this explanation, by 
calling at the hall-keeper's room the pecuniary indemnity should 
be made right with them; but if any man stayed and heard 
this lecture, he had to stand to the ticket price. [Loud laugh- 
ter and applause.] He had an impression that when they had 
heard this, and not heard the other — [Laughter] — they would 
like this the best. [Eenewed laughter.] He thanked them for 
the great good-nature they had shown — it alleviated his dis- 
tress, and would help him to get through the occasion. [Ap- 
plause.] 

The explanation and apology seemed sufficient ; 
nobody left the hall, though no doubt some of those 
present were as much disappointed as the Rev. Mr. 
Robb had been that day at four o'clock. The Newcastle 
Chronicle the next morning said: "Mr. Beecher gave 
his Gateshead hearers really a more interesting treat 
than the Newcastle audience received." 

Scarborough was our next point. From here the Par- 
kers returned to London, having spent their vacation in 
Scotland and North England. They had been more or 
less with us the past three weeks, and we missed them 



76 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

very much. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher and myself were 
alone when we reached Scarborough, the famous English 
resort — the most famous and fashionable. We arrived 
on Saturday afternoon, the 11th of September. Mr. 
Beecher preached on Sunday for Eev. Dr. Balgarnie in 
the Cliff Street Congregational Church, one of the 
most beautiful church edifices in North England. Dr. 
Balgarnie has presided over a congregation here for up- 
wards of thirty years. As a Christian minister, he is 
known and revered throughout England; and as a citizen 
in the community where he lives, he is a great moral 
and social power. 

The lecture in Scarborough took place in Grand Hall, 
at the Spa, at four o'clock in the afternoon. The Mayor 
presided, and many city officials and ministers and well- 
known men were on the platform. This was, indeed, 
a fashionable English audience, and many people who 
had never heard who "Ward Beecher" was attended 
because it broke the every-day monotony. The wit, 
beauty, and fashion were represented. The aristocratic 
and professional classes were there in large numbers. 
The Scarborough Mercury said: 

1 ' Mr. Beecher has come and gone, leaving a rich heritage 
of thought and knowledge; the great keynote of his lecture 
was education. He really preached from the platform a great 
exhortation of knowledge." 

The Scarborough News said: 

' ' Every form of oratorical supremacy was manifested in the 
speaker's lecture — calm, statistical statement, bursts of moral 
indignation, flashes of humor, whirlwinds of wit, torrents of 
poetical eloquence, undercurrents of tearful pathos, roads of 
calm reasoning, and of all these varied with a voice of the 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 77 

most perfect oratorical mobility— now deepening into a whisper 
of pathos, now rising into a shout of triumphant vindication, 
and again sinking into tones of expressive humor. Perhaps 
it was the humor, the peculiar and original American humor, 
which predominated throughout the whole lecture. It would 
burst out upon every conceivable and inconceivable occasion, 
upon every expected and unexpected opportunity, upon every 
serious and solemn incidence. Yet every burst of humor had 
its solemn significance, and when the lecturer sat down he was 
greeted with a round of applause more encouraging than that 
with which he commenced." 

From Scarborough, in the northeast of England, we 
travelled across the country through Wales down to the 
far southwest. Monday Mr. Beecher lectured in North- 
ampton. I have seldom enjoyed one of Mr. Beecher's 
meetings more than I did this one. The Northampton 
Mercury of September 18th described it well : 

" A very large audience gathered in the Corn Exchange on 
Tuesday evening to hear a lecture on the ' Eeign of the Com- 
mon People, ' by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who during 
the last few months has been preaching and lecturing in this 
country. Mr. Beecher is undoubtedly the greatest American 
preacher living. Thirty years ago his name was a familiar 
one throughout the States; and when the anti-slavery agitation 
began, his was one of the most eloquent voices that appealed 
for emancipation. His energy during that struggle was mar- 
vellous. It was during that crisis that he first visited England, 
and was received with the greatest enthusiasm wherever he 
went. It is no exaggeration, however, to say that where he 
had hundreds of friends and admirers then, there are thou- 
sands now, and his sermons are weekly sent into many thou- 
sands of English homes. Across the ' herring-pond ' he wields 
a mighty influence. It has been said that to the American he 
occupies a position that an Englishman can only understand 
if he imagines a compound of Spurgeon, Dr. Parker, and John 



78 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Bright rolled into one, with a little tinge of the late F. W. Bob- 
ertson added ; and a candidate for the Presidency has very 
poor chances of success if the great preacher is not on his side. 
Henry Ward Beecher is now seventy-three years of age, but he 
seems to have lost none of the old power to charm an audi- 
ence. He is apparently as subtle a thinker as ever; and if he 
has lost vigor, his orations have gained in mellowness and the 
ripeness of experience. At the Corn Exchange Mr. Beecher 
spoke from a temporary platform on the east side of the hall, 
and was fairly well heard by the majority of those present. 
Throughout the lecture he spoke chiefly in a quiet, subdued 
tone of voice, but several times his voice fairly thundered 
through the hall. Cheers and laughter followed in rapid suc- 
cession, and would have been much more frequent but for the 
fear that the lecturer would not be heard. 

" The Bev. J. T. Brown presided, and among those present 
were the Bev. C. LI. Allen (Daventry), the Bev. J. J. Cooper, 
the Bev. J. T. Gasquoine, B.A., the Bev. G. Harrison, the 
Bev. A. B. Middleditch, the Bev. T. Buston (Long Buckby), 
etc., etc. 

' ' The chairman said they were here not only to see Mr. 
Beecher and to listen to him, but to give him a very hearty 
Northampton welcome. [Loud cheers.] Mr. Beecher needed 
no introduction : his name was well-nigh as familiar on this 
as on the other side of the Atlantic; his words were circulated 
among them as if native-born; and though most had not seen 
him in the flesh, yet he had been long known and honored as 
a distinguished power in his own country, a renowned orator 
and preacher, a fearless speaker of his own thoughts and con- 
victions — [Cheers] — in his own way ; — [Hear, hear !] — and 
above all known and honored as a noble advocate of the free- 
dom of the slaves. [Loud cheering.] It was the speaker's 
lot on the eve of the great war which issued in the freedom of 
the slaves to listen at Brooklyn to a sermon of Mr. Beecher, 
and never could he forget the manly and eloquent way in 
which on that occasion he pleaded the cause of the oppressed. 
And that cause had gloriously triumphed. [Cheers.] With 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER, 79 

other reasons, they welcomed Mr. Beecher that night for his 
chivalrous exertions in that great and good work. 

' ' It added not a little to their pleasure that he came from 
America. [Cheers.] America ! in one sense the child and in 
another the brother and the peer of old England. [Loud 
cheers.] 'To a great extent, sir,' said Mr. Brown, turning to 
the lecturer, ' you are ours — [Cheers]— you are of our race 
and kindred, though you have the misfortune of being born 
and living in America/ [Laughter.] America owed not a 
little to Northamptonshire. They had helped to lay the foun- 
dations of the people; they contributed some of the original 
germs of that national life which had so wonderfully grown 
and nourished. There were three names of world-wide repu- 
tation which would not have been possessed by America if 
Northamptonshire had not furnished their ancestors. The 
illustrious Washington — [Cheers] — the mild, sweet poet Long- 
fellow, and the late, most highly-esteemed Garfield belonged 
to Northamptonshire. At Brighton stood the house of the 
Washingtons. From Long Buckby went the Wads worths from 
whom, on one side, Longfellow was descended. They went over 
in the Mayflower. And from Ecton, on the other side of the 
town, the G-arfields went forth about the same time, and found 
home and liberty in that foreign land. [Cheers.] So that 
although our country and America were far apart, yet by 
virtue of such relations and traditions of the past they were 
brought nearer together ; and he concluded with the expres- 
sion of the earnest wish and hope that by Mr. Beecher's visits, 
and by the growing intercourse which made them better ac- 
quainted, these two nations, stronger in their love of liberty 
and in their assertions of the rights of man, might be bound 
together in a close, fruitful, lasting friendship, and might be 
an example of brotherly concord and Christian philanthropy 
in promoting the highest interests of mankind. [Loud cheers.] 
The subject of the lecture was of a vast importance that was 
growing every day, and that would grow more and more 
important in connection with England and the nations of the 
earth. [Cheers.] 



80 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

" Mr. Beecher was received with rounds of applause, and it 
was some minutes before he could proceed. He said he had 
had many and very pleasant introductions since he came to 
England, but none that surpassed the very kind and pregnant 
words just spoken. [Cheers.] If there was any chord that 
vibrated more quickly than any other in his heart, it was that 
of brotherhood; and when he came to England he did not feel 
that he had come to a foreign country. Nor had he been able 
to distinguish any peculiar difference in the countenance of 
Englishmen and Americans. ' We are handsome on our side, 
and you are on your side. [Laughter.] Perhaps, indeed, you 
have some advantages over us, but we are a young country 
and we will catch up with you yet.' [More laughter.] After a 
tender allusion to Mr. Brown's references to ' distinguished 
emigrants ' from Northamptonshire — men who had made 
American history rich — he said that since he had been here 
he had found almost all his familiar American towns again. 
His mother was born in Guilford— and she was none the worse 
for that. [Laughter.] Northampton itself was associated 
with almost the whole period of his own personal education. 
[Cheers.] There he was graduated, — but it was in Massa- 
chusetts. That town derived its name from this ; and it was 
not unworthy of it, either, in its history, which in early times 
was bloody in the Indian warfare, and the place had since 
become known for the cultivation of its people and for the in- 
stitutions of learning which flourished there. So that when 
invited to Northampton it seemed to him as if a vision of his 
boyhood had come to him again, and he came to the town 
with very willing enthusiasm. But certainly he had had such 
a reception and such a country spread before him as he had 
never anticipated." 

(Full report of the lecture followed.) 

From Northampton we went to Shrewsbury, and 
thence to Tredegar, Wales. In the large Temperance 
Hall, in the centre of the town, Mr. Beecher was re- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 81 

ceived with vociferous cheers given by an up-standing 
assembly, whose elation increased when Mr. Beecher 
said that he had Welsh blood in his veins. One of his 
ancestors was a Welsh woman; and as to anything ex- 
traordinary that he said or did they might "consider 
that as Welsh." He thoroughly delighted his Welsh 
audience, and in his religious periods produced a genu- 
ine Welsh f \ hwyl. " Hundreds came to hear him from 
the neighboring hills. 

At Torquay he preached Sunday, September 19th, and 
lectured Monday evening. The sermon and lecture were 
under the auspices of the Y. M. 0. A., and on both oc- 
casions the Eoyal Public Hall (better known as the Cir- 
cus) was crowded. 

Torquay is another favored resort, and in many re- 
spects is more attractive than Scarborough, where we 
had spent the previous Sabbath. Mr. Beecher remarked 
to the audience, after being introduced by the chairman 
(Mr. H. P. Samuelson, J. P.), that he had traversed va- 
rious parts of England and Scotland, and he had reached 
the climax in Torquay, for if there was any other place 
by land or sea surpassing Torquay in various interests 
it was altogether too good. (Laughter and applause.) 
Mr. Beecher was in one of his most enjoyable moods. 
His visit seemed to be treated as an event in their lives 
by everybody around. 

The Torquay papers were enthusiastic in Mr. Beech- 
er's praise. The Times, at the head of a two-column 
article, pronounced his lecture much more sparkling, 
and certainly more suited to the needs of his audience, 
than the pamphlet lecture of his on the same subject 
that had recently been going the rounds. Eich and 
poor, religious and secular, Eadicals and Tories, were 
6 



82 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

all more than gratified, and the committee that co- 
operated with Messrs. T. Viccars and F. Thomas in 
the work entailed by Mr. Beecher's visit deserved the 
hearty thanks of the large number of benefited hearers 
and readers. People of broad and liberal sentiments 
were delighted, and doubtless not a few persons of more 
narrow sympathies were profited by Mr. Beecher's so- 
cial, religious, and political expositions. 

. From Torquay to Exeter, where Mr. Beecher visited 
the Cathedral, and enjoyed much of the day. At its 
close he lectured. The evening was stormy without, 
yet there were about fifteen hundred people in the audi- 
ence, and his appearance on the platform was the signal 
for well-nigh a storm of applause. The platform was 
filled with distinguished ministers and citizens. Mr. F. 
Thomas, on rising to nominate a chairman, made a few 
introductory remarks, which were received with hearty 
and repeated applause. He begged to propose that their 
cosmopolitan ex-Mayor should take the chair. (Ap- 
plause.) 

" The ex-Mayor, who was cordially received, said he felt it 
a great honor to take the chair at that large meeting, and a 
great privilege to hear one of America's sons. He had been a 
reader of Mr. Beecher's sermons for years, but he never ex- 
pected that he should have had the pleasure of seeing and 
hearing him. He bore an honored name. The name of 
Beecher would ever be an honored and revered name amongst 
the lovers of humanity. He [the chairman] remembered well 
many years ago the deep impression that that wonderful book 
that his sister wrote had upon the mind of tne English people, 
and he was sure that, as Mr. Thomas said, it was the death- 
knell of slavery in America. [Applause. ] In calling upon the 
reverend gentleman to deliver his lecture, he was sure that 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 83 

his fellow-citizens would give him a hearty welcome to this 
old city. [Applause.] 

' ' Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, in some introductory remarks, 
said allusion had been made very kindly both to the members 
of his father's family and also some services that he himself 
had rendered in the cause of emancipation. Allow him to say 
that he counted it among the most. blessed guidances with 
which God had furnished him that from his earliest life, and 
when that cause was deeply unpopular, and when a man was 
supposed to have sacrificed all his chances in life to avow him- 
self an abolitionist, he was allowed by Divine influence to 
identify himself with the poor, and to become a voice for the 
dumb. But when it was said that he had an important in- 
fluence, and moreover that his sister Mrs. Stowe — [Applause] 
— was a main cause of emancipation, he must dissent, and 
take a larger view of the movement than such a scale as that. 
No one man or score of men could overturn that empire of 
Satan in America. They were themselves living in the cur- 
rent, but the providence of God was the force, and their 
acting but feebly reacted against the great sin of slavery. 
[Hear, hear!] And it must be said that it was an instance 
also in which was fulfilled the declaration, ' He restrains the 
wrath of man, and causes the remainder thereof to praise 
him.' For it was not by the conscience of the North, it was 
not by the wisdom of her statesmen, it was not by any events, 
intelligent and purposed on their part, that that great misery 
and wickedness came to its execution and death. [Applause.] 
If they were going to reckon sublunary causes they must reck- 
on the extraordinary and unmitigated folly of the slave-own- 
ers: they were their own executioners. Their pride and am- 
bition, their domination, although they had held government 
for fifty years, and could have held it for fifty more prospec- 
tively, pointed a career in which the argument was uttered by 
the sword, and when once it was submitted to the arbitrament 
of war every man could see that slavery was at an end. After 
five grievous years and numberless battles and the waste — lit- 



84 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

erally — of millions of lives, and at an expense that almost out- 
ran computation by figures, was brought to an end that gigan- 
tic system of modern cruelty and modern weakness— American 
slavery. Not as the result of anybody's eloquence, but by the 
right hand and wisdom of Him who decided the fate of nations 
this thing was done, and no person more profoundly than Mrs. 
Stowe recognized that she was an instrument in the hands of 
God. "When, in a discussion of differences between some of 
her other works and ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' she was giving a 
reason why her later writings were thus or thus, he replied to 
her, ' Well, but in ' ' Uncle Tom's Cabin" you did not put it 
so.' ' Ah,' she said, ' that was not my book — that was given 
to me. ' And she always spoke of it to this day as an inspira- 
tion of God, and as if she was only the amanuensis. [Ap- 
plause.] The reverend gentleman then proceeded to his lec- 
ture." 

We went next to Plymouth, Southampton, Ports- 
mouth, and arrived at Brighton on Saturday, September 
25th, where Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were to have another 
sojourn in a famous English resort. 

" Pond," said Mr. Beecher, "has it occurred to you 
that we have but four more weeks in this country? 
Then, sir, look out! I shall be my own master." 

We reached Brighton in somewhat gloomy spirits. 
Mrs. Beecher had not been well. The chilly, damp air 
of autumn was having a bad effect upon her. Mr. 
Beecher perceived it, and mentioned it to me. My 
brother had been ill for several days, and hardly able to 
get out. I was also suffering fearfully from malarial 
trouble. Mr. Beecher remarked, " We are a sort of 
travelling infirmary: I am the only well one of the lot." 

He preached in Brighton, for Rev. J. H. Shillson, to 
a crowded congregation in the Queen's Square Congre- 
gational Church. The following evening he lectured. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 85 

I quote the Brighton Daily Chronicle of September 
28th: 

' ' On Monday evening the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher de- 
livered a lecture in the Dome at Brighton on ' The Wastes and 
Burdens of Society.' Notwithstanding the unfavorable state 
of the weather there was a large audience, it being estimated 
that nearly three thousand persons were present. The famous 
American divine, who, although seventy-three years of age, 
retains much of his old vigor and looked in robust health, was 
greeted with prolonged cheering. The Mayor (Alderman E. J. 
Reeves) presided, and as chief magistrate of the town ten- 
dered to the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher a most cordial wel- 
come. The lecturer, when the hearty applause which greeted 
him on rising had subdued, at once plunged into his subject, 
saying that the science of the production of wealth and its ap- 
plication to the happiness of society was the standpoint from 
which he wished to speak to them to-night." 

(Here follows a verbatim report of the lecture.) 



86 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER IV. 

BACK IN LONDON. 

Tuesday, September 28th, was a day and evening 
never to be forgotten by the friends who assembled at 
Memorial Hall in London to extend to Mr. and Mrs. 
Beecher a right English welcome. They were the Lon- 
don Board of Congregational Ministers. It had been 
decided by them to extend no invitations outside of their 
regular membership, notwithstanding the urgent ap- 
peals that were made not only from brother ministers 
and ex-members in London, but from all parts of the 
Kingdom. This course received general censure by the 
religious newspapers, as the large hall belonging to the 
board offered ample facilities for a greater number. 
The Christian World said : 

' ' The usually dull routine of the London Board of Congre- 
gational Ministers was this week broken through by the pres- 
ence of a man before whom dulness flies like mist before the 
sun, and who has the rare gift of clothing theology, which in 
the hands of most is a weariness to the flesh, with all the 
charm which belongs to reality and life. It was a most seemly 
thing that the ministers of that section of the church to which 
Mr. Beecher more especially belongs should have had the op- 
portunity of shaking by the hand and listening to the voice of 
one to whose sermons and prayers every ministry which as- 
pires to be abreast of the times owes so much of suggestion 
and inspiration. It is much to be regretted that the invita- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 87 

tion to meet Mr. Beecher was not extended to every Congre- 
gational and Baptist minister in London. There would have 
been peculiar appropriateness in this, since in his own church 
at Brooklyn he is in the habit of sprinkling or pouring or im- 
mersing, as may be desired in each particular case. Nor can 
we see any reason why such a united gathering should not 
have been held, especially after the great display of brotherly 
feeliug in May, as the large room would have afforded ample 
accommodation for the ministers of both bodies with their 
wives. But instead of this it was limited to the Congrega- 
tional ministers who are actually members of the board, thus 
excluding one third even of those in the Congregational min- 
istry in London. Even former members of the board sought 
for tickets of admission in vain. It is a cause for sincere re- 
gret that an occasion which proved so touching and memor- 
able should not have been enjoyed by the largest possible 
number. It is, however, a cause for thankfulness that in 
spite of official resistance, by the unanimous vote of those ac- 
tually present, it was decided that reporters should be admit- 
ted, so that those who were not privileged to be present, and 
could not see the face or hear the touching accents of Mr. 
Beecher's voice, will be able to read in our columns the very 
words, and all of them, of his memorable address and not less 
memorable prayer. 

' ' Mr. Beecher was evidently deeply moved by the enthu- 
siasm of his reception, declaring it to have been one of the 
most memorable occasions of his life, of which he could not 
boast, but which he could gratefully rehearse to his children — 
more to him even than his church. As at Glasgow, his ad- 
dress was chiefly autobiographical, his own spiritual experi- 
ence being used as a mirror in which the anguish produced by 
the old Calvinistic theology shone out with singular clearness. 
Tried by such a test, Calvinism, as a representation of the char- 
acter of One revealed as our Father, must stand condemned. 
What agony, what despair, what madness, have followed in 
its train ! Here and there, as Mr. Beecher asserted, ' it 
makes a man, but where it makes one, it kills five hundred.' 



88 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Happily, its day in England is nearly over; whilst even in 
Scotland the words of her own sons, Thomas Erskine, McLeod, 
Campbell, A. J. Scott, in the past, and of George MacDonald, 
Walter 0. Smith, and others happily still in our midst, to say 
nothing of Englishmen who have passed across the border, 
like John Pulsford, are gradually but surely flooding that 
land with a tender light in which this great calumny on the 
Heavenly Father must surely be banished. Its banishment 
will be like the lifting of a hideous nightmare from many a 
tender and sensitive heart. If we are not greatly mistaken, 
the words spoken by Mr. Beecher in this visit to our land will 
be no mean factor in hastening the day in which men will 
wonder that the Church was ever held captive by such views 
of One whose nature is declared to be love. If the time 
should ever come in which not only one section, but the whole 
Church, should thus front the world, Mr. Beecher will have 
been one of the heralds who has prepared its way. He will 
assuredly go back to his own land linked to thousands in this 
country by the tenderest associations, and with their most 
loving wishes circling his way." 

Of all the religious assemblies I have had the happi- 
ness to attend, this was surely the greatest to me. The 
love I felt for Dr. Allon on hearing him deliver his 
eloquent address of welcome is more than I can de- 
scribe. He had risen to the occasion. He realized that 
which was due to sterling worth, and amply paid the 
tribute. 

Mr. Beecher lectured in Ipswich the following even- 
ing to a crowded audience in the Public Hall. The 
Mayor presided. At a very early hour the next day 
Mr. Beecher and I (Mrs. Beecher had remained in Lon- 
don) took the early train for Norwich, where we ar- 
rived at 8 o'clock in the morning to find the beautiful 
cathedral city asleep. At the Royal Hotel we surprised 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 89 

and disgusted poor ' ' boots" that men should think of 
disturbing the cook and housemaids and want break- 
fast at that "beastly" hour. There being no room in 
readiness nor immediate prospect of breakfast, we wan- 
dered about the city until nine, found a market open, 
purchased pears, plums, melons, and tomatoes sufficient 
to supply a good-sized picnic-party for a day; had them 
sent to our hotel and waited for a sumptuous breakfast, 
which we had from the material furnished by ourselves. 

By and by we went to religious service in the Cathe- 
dral, which is one of the noblest in England. It is 
built of flint and English oak. The spire is the high- 
est in England, and it has stood just as it does now over 
five hundred years. Many interesting incidents and 
legends were related to Mr. Beecher, and he enjoyed 
them heartily. 

We also visited St. Andrew's Hall and several institu- 
tions about the city, and when at last we returned and 
got settled in comfortable rooms, we really enjoyed the 
Royal Hotel. The lecture was under the auspices of 
the Y. M. C. A., in Victoria Hall, which was crowded 
to its fullest capacity. Sir T. Fowell Buxton presided. 
The Mayoress and several of the clergymen and minis- 
ters were on the platform, while in the large audience 
sat many of the principal gentry and citizens of Nor- 
wich, as well as ministers of several denominations, who 
had come in from surrounding towns. 

The chairman in presenting the speaker bade him 
a hearty welcome to Norwich; he said that Norwich 
and Suffolk men took no small part in the long struggle 
which abolished slavery in the British dominions in 
1834. They were therefore the more able to appreciate 
the privilege of having among them one who was the 



90 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

leading standard-bearer in a similar struggle. Not 
until the history of that struggle came to be written 
should they know how great a part was played by him 
they welcomed. 

On the following morning our train left Norwich for 
London at 6 o'clock — not so unseasonable an hour in 
America, but in England equivalent to our 3 A.M. 
No conveyance was to be had at that hour. We were 
obliged to walk to the station, about a mile and a half. 
Although the sun was up, not a living being did we 
see, except one kennel-keeper who was letting out a 
pack of about thirty greyhounds for a run. Both he 
and the dogs seemed surprised at seeing men about, and 
looked upon us with no little suspicion. We were the 
only passengers to start for London so early. But it 
was a pleasant ride; we reached London at 10.30, 
and enjoyed several hours' sight-seeing before Mr. 
Beecher's hour for the afternoon nap. The lecture that 
evening was in London, Union Chapel, Islington (Rev. 
Dr. Allon's church), and was on "The Reign'-' (as we 
had come into the habit of calling it). The great 
"chapel" was packed, and here for the first time I saw 
conclusively that London was the place to give lectures 
in, if one were after money alone. 

Sunday, October 3d, Mr. Beecher preached in Lon- 
don, in the Public Hall, West Norwood, S. E. Though 
this was in London, it was ten miles drive across the 
city from Dr. Parker's, where Mr. and Mrs. Beecher 
made their London home. The lecture took place in 
the same hall the Monday evening following. Being 
the accustomed subject, " Reign," no special mention 
was made in the London papers. 

The next evening the lecture was given in Leicester 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 91 

to a large audience in Floral Hall. We returned next 
morning to London by early train to enjoy two days' 
"rest," as he called it. I think he was more fatigued 
by those two days in looking about London than by 
any other two days we had passed during the season. 
On October 7th we experienced a London fog — the first 
any of our party had ever witnessed. The city lamps 
were lighted as though it really were night; but the fog 
was so thick that the gaslights could not penetrate it. 
It was worse than having night in the daytime. 

Our English tour was nearing its close. Mr. Beech er 
had been engaged to lecture on " Conscience," in City 
Temple (London), on the 8th, and his last lecture in 
London, on "Evolution and Keligion," was advertised 
for St. James' Hall on Monday evening, October 11th. 
He wished these were over, for he wanted to visit friends 
and see sights in London, which he could not if under 
obligations to the public. I was sceptical as to the 
prospects in City Temple, as Mr. Beecher had now 
already lectured and spoken so many times in London; 
but when the evening came, the audience came, and I 
began to think that October was a much better time for 
lectures than September. The Temple contained a 
magnificent audience. The chairman of the evening 
was Mr. James Clarke of the Christian World, and sit- 
ting by him on the platform were a number of clergy- 
men and ministers, including Dr. Parker. In a few 
hearty sentences that were roundly cheered, Mr. Clarke 
introduced the lecturer, saying: 

"It is fortunate that no speech is required from your 
chairman on this occasion; for I much doubt whether I could 
make my voice heard throughout this great building. But I 
must say how highly I appreciate the honor of having been 



92 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

asked to preside on this occasion, and thus have my name 
associated, even for one evening, with our illustrious visitor 
so soon about to leave us. Four-and-twenty years ago I had 
the good fortune to hear several of Mr. Beecher's speeches in 
this country; and one of them, at least, addressed to the then 
students of New College, I shall never wholly forget. Since 
that time it has fallen to my lot to circulate his eloquent and 
quickening sermons by hundreds of thousands; and to their 
influence upon the minds of the people I may safely attribute 
not a little of the cordial welcome given to him in all parts of 
the country on his present visit; and we may hope and trust 
that these sermons will be continued for many years to come. " 

The chairman having resumed his seat, Mr. Beecher 
rose, and, amid the warmest manifestations of favorable 
public feeling, advanced, after his custom, to the front 
of the platform, bearing in his hands a few loose sheets 
of manuscript, to which he referred at intervals during 
his speech. Not till those present had unmistakably 
shown that they were with him heart and soul, and that 
he had not a jealous enemy among them, was Mr. 
Beecher allowed to do more than steadfastly gaze at the 
throng of admiring and loving faces directed towards 
his own, while a slight nervous twitching of his mouth 
alone betrayed the emotion under which he labored. 
He was looking well and robust ; his voice was far 
stronger than when he lectured in London before, and 
was heard with the greatest ease throughout ; and he 
soon gave proof that not only was he in the best of 
spirits, but that he had at his easy command that night 
all his unrivalled resources of dramatic oratory in their 
most brilliant form. 

Great interest had been manifested in the announce- 
ment that Mr. Beecher's last lecture in London would 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 03 

be on Evolution and Religion. I had secured St. James' 
Hall, and advertised the lecture in the daily and relig- 
ious papers ; and there was much talk and speculation 
as to the result. I invited many clergymen and minis- 
ters to preside, but they regretted that "unavoidable 
circumstances prevented." Here was a new develop- 
ment ! Even ardent friends and admirers declined the 
honor with thanks — men who had been unsparing in 
their praise, both with their pens and in their pulpits. 
I visited scientists, but they, with all sorts of good things 
to say of Mr. Beecher, had decided not to accept any 
invitations. I feared that the duty of presiding would 
devolve upon the manager. Late in the afternoon, I 
visited a very dear clerical friend and suggested that he 
would have to preside. He stiffly replied, " No, it will 
not do/' I thought of a brave man in London, to whom 
I had been introduced at a dinner given by a club of 
which I was a member, while in New York. I had 
heard him make a glorious after-dinner speech — it came 
to me that he was the man of all, and I wondered why 
I had not thought of him before. I immediately de- 
spatched a friend to Mecklenburg Square, with Mr. 
Beecher's and my compliments to George Augustus 
Sala, and asked him if he would be kind enough to 
preside. He immediately said, " Yes, I will be proud of 
the honor — there is nothing that I would not do for my 
American friends." 

St. James' Hall contained as fine and select an audi- 
ence as I ever saw. The out-of-towners had come back 
to London. Many had made short their holiday for the 
purpose of being back to hear the lecture. The ever- 
true and loyal friend, Mr. Clarke, and his sons (his part- 
ners in business), were in the audience ; clergymen and 



94 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

ministers were there too, but conspicuous for their ab- 
sence from the platform. 

Dr. Parker had accompanied his friend and was sitting 
by his side on the platform waiting for the chairman to 
arrive. The audience was quiet ; there was an atmos- 
phere of fear, and hope that all might go well; that Mr. 
Beecher would not spoil all the good work and lose, all 
the good friends he had made in England. I thought, 
"How foolish people can be! How stiff and unyielding 
is religious prejudice! With all their experience of Mr. 
Beecher during these four months, why can't they Jcnoto 
that he will not do or say anything that is not becoming 
a Christian minister, a man, and a gentleman ?" 

The chairman arrived, and at once proceeded to intro- 
duce the lecturer in eloquent words, which I regret were 
not taken down at the time. He said there was not the 
slightest need that he should expatiate on the many and 
varied merits of the reverend gentleman ; that he had 
the great honor of introducing to them the eloquent 
orator, the learned divine, and he might say the patriot 
citizen of the greatest Eepublic in the world. The audi- 
ence cheered and cheered again. 

Mr. Beecher stepped to the front of the platform. 
The cheering this time was less exuberant * than on 
former occasions. I occupied a seat near the front 
where I could watch every muscle and nerve of his face. 
I could see the meaning expression of his eye. I felt 
that he was equipped for the occasion, and the audience 
was to be treated to one of his best speeches. 

I will not burden the page with extracts or even a 
synopsis of the numerous press reports that followed. 
Every daily newspaper and the religious papers reported 
the lecture at great length. Many published it in full. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 95 

I quote only a few lines from leading papers. At the 
head of a two-column editorial the Christian World said: 

" Before a large and evidently highly appreciative audience 
Mr. Beecher expounded in St. James' Hall, on Monday even- 
ing, his views on the relation of the new scientific doctrine 
of evolution to the cardinal articles of the Christian faith. 
Notwithstanding the oratorical labors of the last few months, 
Mr. Beecher appeared to be in excellent health, whilst his 
brilliant, suggestive, and impressive lecture showed that his 
mental power is still as great as when he was in the prime of 
his life." 

The London Morning Post published a column and a 
half review of the lecture, heading the article as follows: 

"Evolution and Eeligion 

was the title of a lecture delivered last night at St. James' 
Hall before a large audience by the Eev. Henry Ward Beecher. 
Mr. G. A. Sala presided, and introduced the lecturer in a 
eulogistic speech. Mr. Beecher, who was very warmly received, 
said that the subject of his address was a difficult one, and 
was one of the deepest interest to him." 

The Daily Telegraph said : 

" The Eev. Henry Ward Beecher closed his lecturing tour in 
England last night at St. James' Hall, before a very large 
audience. The lecturer was introduced by Mr. George Augus- 
tus Sala. Argument, illustration, and humor were in turn em- 
ployed, while laughter at one moment and applause at another 
testified to the enjoyment of his audience and to their hearty 
concurrence in his views. . . . Having stated his reasons for 
thinking that the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution 
would neither do away with churches nor with sects, and 
having pointed out how evolution established, on a rational 
basis, the belief in immortality, Mr. Beecher brought his 



96 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

lecture to a conclusion. He was, he said, an honest man. He 
would never say that which he did not believe, though he might 
have uttered in his earlier years opinions which greater experi- 
ence had taught him to modify. He had a right at this late 
period of his life, when all hvman inducements were free and 
could tempt him no more, to say, as an honest man, as a 
Christian man, and as a Christian preacher, that evolution 
was the greatest blessing, not to biology, not to physiology, not 
to sociology, but to religion. It was with unspeakable grati- 
tude that he declared his thanksgiving to Him who gave our 
Lord Jesus Christ unto us that He was now bringing round 
about the Church of His love an illumination that indicated 
that the night was far spent and the day at hand. [Loud 
cheers.] The usual votes of thanks to the lecturer and the 
chairman were passed before the meeting terminated." 

The next day we visited Mr. and Mrs. James Clarke 
at their home in Caterham, Surrey. It was a stormy 
day. October rains had set in and the air was chilly and 
damp. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were at the Charing Cross 
Station at 10 o'clock when Mr. Clarke joined us. We 
travelled together to Caterham, a suburban village, about 
thirty miles from London. Mr. Clarke's carriage was in 
waiting and drove us up the beautiful valley for a mile 
and a half to Beechhanger, the palatial 1 3sidence of the 
most successful publisher of a religious newspaper and 
religious periodicals in the world. The drive up the 
valley resembles, more than any I have ever seen, the 
drive from the station in Peekskill, N. Y., to Mr. 
Beecher's home, " Boscobel," and the two residences 
are not unlike in situation. Mr. Clarke found an eleva- 
tion beautifully situated to command a view of the valley 
below and the far-off surrounding hills. The grounds 
were adorned with ornamental trees of endless variety; 
among them the most stately and beautiful beech-trees 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER, 97 

in that part of England, we thought. As we were con- 
fined most of the day in. the house on account of the 
rain, I had an opportunity of looking through the large 
library, which, by the way, is the finest private library 
I have ever seen. In one room alone I found files of 
Mr. Clarke's publications running back as far as 1850 ; 
that of the Christian World Pulpit since 1861, I think. 
I took down the first volume and saw on the first column 
of the first page, "A Sermon by Eev. Henry Ward 
Beecher, preached in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn," and 
reported especially for that periodical. I had a curi- 
osity to see whether during Mr. Beecher's troubles the 
publications had been discontinued, so I went through 
every number up to 1886, and found that not in one 
number had there been such a hiatus. For twenty- five 
years, through tempest and sunshine and darkness and 
light, Mr. James Clarke had published every week one of 
Mr. Beecher's sermons. Mr. Beecher was not aware of 
it. I knew he was not, as I had been searching high 
and low for years, collecting everything of Mr. Beecher's 
that was ever published, and I found here in a private 
library in England the most complete collection of Mr. 
Beecher's sermons, prayers, and lecture-room talks in 
existence. I told Mr. Beecher, the day after, of my dis- 
covery. He said later, "That's a friend worth having." 
He had never personally known Mr. Clarke until the day 
of our visit to Caterham. 

It rained that evening as though the heavens had 
sprung a leak. We went to the church, where Mr. 
Beecher addressed the Congregational School of Minis- 
ters' Sons. It was the most inclement night that we 
encountered in England. On returning to London we 
reached Charing Cross at 11.30 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. 
7 



98 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

Beecher rode in a hansom-cab six miles to Dr. Parker's, 
where they found their friends waiting. Mr. Beecher 
said as we parted at the station, ' ' I am pleased with 
this day's work : one can afford to be tired after so en- 
joyable a day." Both he and Mrs. Beecher have since 
spoken of it as among the most pleasant events of the 
tour. 

The never-to-be-forgotten Friday morning, October 
15th, Mr. Beecher addressed the Theological Students in 
City Temple. A full report of it is in this volume. 

Our stay in London was now fast coming to an 
end. Invitations from every direction came for Mr. 
Beecher to address different institutions, so that in spite 
of all his resolves to have a holiday, he could not refuse 
the pressing demands, as far as lay in his power to ac- 
cept, and he consented to address the Freedman's Mis- 
sions Aid Society at 10 a.m. This brought together 
another large congregation in Westminster Chapel. It 
was on a cause of great interest in England, and not- 
withstanding its being Saturday, and morning, and at an 
early hour, the great chapel was filled with one of Lon- 
don's most intelligent audiences. The Chairman, Eev. 
H. Simon, said they had often before welcomed there 
the friends of the Freedman's Aid Society, though never 
at that hour of the day. Mr. Beecher, however, had 
fixed the time, and they were ready to do anything to 
oblige him. The address is given in this volume. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEEGHER. 99 



CHAPTER V. 

FAREWELL TO LONDON. 

Mr. Beecher had been tendered a reception by the 
Congregational Board at Liverpool on Monday the 18th. 
He preached his farewell sermon on Sunday morning, 
October 17th, in Dr. Parker's great City Temple, 
where, on the 1st of July, he had received his first wel- 
come to England. The congregation had to be admitted 
by ticket up to a certain hour; then the Temple doors 
were opened wide. Many hundreds had to be disap- 
pointed. City Temple was beautifully decorated with 
flowers in unusual abundance. Accommodations for 
the audience filled every available inch of room. Mr. 
Beecher preached on the " Mystery of Suffering" (the 
last sermon in this book). At the end of the services 
Dr. Parker said : 

' ' I cannot allow the meeting to close without publicly 
thanking Mr. Beecher for all the service which he has rendered 
the Christian churches in this country, and above all to the 
church assembling within these walls. My thanks are not di- 
minished in warmth or in emphasis when I remember that all 
this service has been rendered without fee or reward. I must 
also thank the members of Plymouth Church for having spared 
their pastor even for a few weeks, that he might render Chris- 
tian service in this country. I envy Mr. Beecher the welcome 
which awaits him in his own city, alike by the members of 
Plymouth Church and by the citizens at large; yet I cannot 



100 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

but hope that in the enthusiasm of their welcome they will re- 
member the pensiveness of our farewell. We will not look 
upon this separation as final. ' Hope springs eternal in the 
human breast.' We cannot tell what may occur to bring Mr. 
and Mrs. Beecher back again to us, but if anything of that 
nature should happen, we should indeed be dull-minded if we 
did not instantly interpret it as a gracious providence. Mr. 
Beecher so leaves us that we are sorry he is going, and he has 
left behind him so many memories of inspiration and gratitude 
that we shall all long to see his face amongst us once more. 
We shall thus part without despair. We will amend the Pa- 
gan phrase : ' Vale ! Vale ! ' — Mm ceternum Vale ! If we 
meet not again here, there is no reason why we may not all 
meet in the land of the great departed, in the Jerusalem whose 
streets are gold and whose walls are jasper. The eloquent 
preacher will have exhorted us in vain if any wanderer be lost. 
Here is an opportunity for sacred vows. Here is a holy hour. 
Why not now say, ' God helping me, I mean to be in heaven 
too?' No man ever offered that prayer, carrying with it 
the whole stress of his heart, who remained unanswered and 
uncomf orted. " 



We were to take our departure for Liverpool at 5 
o'clock. There were so many friends to be bidden 
good-by, Mr. Beecher could have remained in City 
Temple all that day shaking hands with them. Return- 
ing to Daleham Gardens with Dr. Parker and his wife, 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher and myself partook of our last 
dinner in London. I shall not forget the sadness of 
that occasion; neither can I express the sympathy and 
love that went out from my heart to Dr. Parker as I saw 
him take his friend by the hand, and kiss him upon the 
cheek, and say the parting " God bless you." As I took 
the good man by the hand, and was about to speak, I 
saw the tears dropping from his eyes, and held my peace. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 101 

Having to preach that evening, Dr. Parker could not 
accompany our party to the station, but Mrs. Parker 
was Mrs. Beecher's escort to the special car that was in 
waiting to take us to Liverpool. At the station we 
found groups of friends waiting for an opportunity to 
speak once more to Mr. and Mrs. Beecher. There 
were two little girls, eleven and thirteen years of age, 
who had attended all of Mr. Beecher's sermons in Lon- 
don, and to whom he had become very much attached. 
They told him he was the first " Dissenter" they had 
ever heard. The hour and the minute came; all were 
on board; " Good-by," and we rolled out of London. 
Mr. Beecher could not speak; his heart was with the 
dear friends from whom he had parted never to see 
again in this life. Mrs. Beecher participated in his 
tender sadness, and spoke gently to him. He roused 
as if from sleep, and said, "I wish everybody knew 
Dr. Parker as intimately as I do. He is a good man; 
he is a Christian man." 

Former acquaintanceship between Dr. Parker and Mr. 
Beecher had brought them together. Dr. Parker and 
his wife had been entertained by Mr. Beecher on two 
separate occasions in America. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher 
were induced to visit England in part by the prospect of 
visiting these friends, for Dr. and Mrs. Parker had 
been our coworkers in helping to bring about the tour. 
These visits brought the two men into close association, 
and being of congenial natures, they became very fond 
of each other. The home of Dr. and Mrs. Parker, with 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher as their guests, was a very enjoy- 
able one. Their interesting table-talks and discussions 
were treasures of repartee, wit, humor, and scholarly 
argument. Arrangements were so made that during 



102 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

that summer holiday Dr. Parker and his wife were often 
with us two or three days at a time. They became a 
portion of our party. We travelled together, and had 
our special dining-rooms and parlors in common. The 
companionship of these four persons was the most envi- 
able, I believe, that ever a man of my position enjoyed. 
The riches of New York could not be as much to me as 
the pleasant experiences of that summer. 

Monday, October 18th, was our last day in England. 
The Liverpool Congregational Board — a body which is 
composed mostly if not wholly of ministers of the Con- 
gregational body resident in Liverpool — gave Mr. Beech- 
er a reception at 11 a.m. at the Junior Eeform Club. 
The room was very much crowded. Several out-of-town 
ministers were present. Mr. Beecher was very much 
pleased with the warm reception he received, the ten- 
der expressions of regard and acknowledgments of 
good derived from his teaching, and last, but not 
least, with the very eloquent speech made by Rev. 
Charles A. Berry of Wolverhampton in proposing a 
vote of thanks. 

As we drove back to our hotel Mr. Beecher said that 
he was now glad that he had lived to visit England and 
to see the fruits of fifty years' teaching. He was even 
inclined to think he was better appreciated in England 
than at home. 

"The speech of Rev. Charles Berry ought to have 
made you happy," I remarked. 

" If I am not mistaken, that man will be heard from 
some day," said Mr. Beecher. " He has got the right 
stuff in him." 

I had met no young minister in my travels through- 
out the country that so favorably impressed me: simple, 



WITH HENRY WAKD BEECHER. 103 

modest, gentle, and with a force of language and logic 
that drew one very near to him. 

The Eev. 0. Davies (of Blackburn), after speaking of 
Mr. Beecher in eulogistic terms, seconded the vote of 
thanks, and said that the only thing he had against Mr. 
Beecher was that he had failed to keep an engagement 
in Blackburn some weeks ago. The motion was carried 
amidst loud applause. 

Mr. Beecher, in acknowledging the compliment, said 
that he had one or two more words to say. 

He had got the vote, and they could not go back upon that. 
[Laughter.] Mr. Beecher proceeded to explain the reason he 
did not keep his engagement in Blackburn. He had adopted 
a system of lectureship in which an agent undertook all the 
arrangements. This agent was to the lecturer what the law- 
yer was to law, and a doctor to medicine. He had bargained 
with Mr. Pond. He received forty pounds for each lecture, 
and Mr. Pond paid all expenses. Mr. Pond took great care of 
him— [Laughter] — and all that was left for him to do was to 
deliver the lectures. He had nothing to do, any more than a 
piece of artillery which was charged by men and went off 
when they touched it. [Laughter.] If he had had to make 
all the arrangements he would never have been a lecturer at 
all. He was a perfect believer in what Napoleon had indi- 
cated, that letters answered themselves in thirty days. He had 
received a great number of letters recently. Many of them 
he had meant to answer, but he had been all his life mean- 
ing to answer some letters. [Laughter.] He had meant to do 
a good many things which had never been performed, and if 
his friend from Blackburn was disappointed he would remind 
him that he might have been disappointed had he kept his en- 
gagement there. [Laughter.] About August, September, 
and October, when at home, he was subject to hay -fever, and 
while in England this year he had suffered from considerable 
depression. He had gone to Moffat for a week's rest, and this 



104 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

brought about the abandonment of the Blackburn engage- 
ment. He had travelled with Mr. Pond some four hundred 
thousand miles, had lectured some one thousand one hun- 
dred times, but had only five times failed to deliver a lecture 
when announced to do so. With this explanation he hoped 
he should be restored to their good graces. His treatment in 
England during his present visit entirely blotted out his pre- 
vious experiences, and all he had suffered before was now 
rubbed out, and they started again with a clean slate. [Ap- 
plause.] 

After a few words from the chairman Mr. Beecher brought 
the proceedings to a close by engaging in prayer. 

In the evening Mr. Beecher lectured in Hengler's 
Circus on i( Evolution and Religion." This was his last 
lecture in England. Fully as large an audience had as- 
sembled as had come to hear him in the same place on 
the 16th of August. The chairman, Mr. E. R. Russell, 
M.P., in introducing Mr. Beecher said: 

They had met there to hear a great orator — one who had 
done more by his genius and eloquence than any other man, 
unless it were their own John Bright, to spread among the 
whole English-speaking people of the world a community of 
sentiment and of intelligence. 

They also honored Mr. Beecher because he was a life-long 
friend of liberty — [Cheers]— of freedom of human condition; 
freedom of thought; freedom of spirit; freedom in every re- 
spect in which it could advance human interests and make for 
the common weal. There were probably many there who re- 
membered as he did when Mr. Beecher's grea* sister — [Cheers] 
— made her mark upon the mind and sympathies of the world 
by her story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and he remembered 
how pleasing it was soon after to learn that she had a brother 
who was worthy of herself, and who was engaged in the same 
noble task which she was so energetically prosecuting. They 



WITH HENRY WARD BEE'CHER. 105 

had watched his career since, and they knew he had done his 
utmost for that great cause to which he had devoted himself, 
and that it had been the great triumph of his life to see him 
succeed, and to see human freedom make a great advance in 
his country. Now they had to receive him in another capac- 
ity — as one devoted to the improvement and enlightenment of 
the human kind; and they rejoiced that so many of his efforts 
had been directed to this end in connection with religion. 
His views were characterized by great liberality, and at § the 
same time, in the judgment of many who were well qualified 
to form a conviction upon such a matter, thoroughly rooted 
in the great doctrines upon which our faith and our salvation 
must depend. [Applause.] It was not for him (Mr. Eussell) 
to offer any observation upon the subject of the lecture. He 
only looked forward, as they all did, to have the truth placed 
in new lights. There were in the hall at the moment many 
opinions on the subject of Evolution, and they could not ex- 
pect them to be fused into one even by the eloquence of Mr. 
Ward Beecher; but they did expect much to be added to 
their intellectual stock, and that their habits of reflection 
and observation would be improved by the lecture they were 
about to enjoy. [Loud applause.] 

At the close of the lecture, which held the audience 
spell-bound for two and a half hours, a motion of thanks 
was proposed by the Rev. Ogmore Davies. Mr. Beecher 
in acknowledging the vote said: 

He thanked them for their cordial reference to his country. 
That Englishmen should not love America was simply mon- 
strous. They were of the same blood and race-stock, the same 
institutions, the same religious belief. American history was 
simply an evolution from that of the English. [Applause. ] 
He had always said that Americans were nothing but good 
Englishmen planted in a better soil. [Laughter and applause. ] 
When the English-speaking races were united, they would 



106 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

sweep the nations of the earth, not by a sword, but by a bet- 
ter humanity, lifting men into the higher sphere of morality 
and religion. [Loud applause.] 



We spent Friday, October 19th, in Liverpool. My 
brother Ozias had been quite feeble for some time, and 
now was very ill, and we were obliged to leave him at 
the Northwestern Hotel to take the Etruria the Satur- 
day following. We were to join him at Queenstown. 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher and I left Liverpool for Belfast 
via Fleetwood. We took a steamer at the latter place, 
and were made quite comfortable until we arrived at 
Belfast at nine o'clock on the morning of October 20th. 
Here we had another experience. Mr. Beecher had 
never seen a jaunting-car, and, while there were hacks 
and customary English vehicles that were luxurious and 
comfortable, he proposed to be a i( Roman while in 
Kome," and we succeeded in getting our luggage and 
ourselves into a jaunting-car, and were whirled and tossed 
around corners and over rough pavements, and very soon 
stopped at the Imperial Hotel. Whether either Mr. or 
Mrs. Beecher or both drew a square breath during that 
ride I never knew. I know that each held firmly to the 
seat until we stopped; and neither took any particular 
interest in viewing the scenery along the line, or had 
any remarks to pass as to how they liked Ireland. Af- 
ter Mr. Beecher had once got down and assisted Mrs. 
Beecher to the ground he remarked : 

"I am not anxious to know anything more about 
jaunting-cars." 

The Imperial Hotel at Belfast is the model European 
hotel of all that we saw during our tour in Great Brit- 
ain; nothing was more sumptuous or more near to just 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1()7 

right, in all our travels, from mine host to the " boots." 
It made the jolly landlord happy to compliment his ho- 
tel, which really was so perfectly kept as to render criti- 
cism impossible. At dinner we all voted, " The best 
bread in the world is to be had at the Imperial Hotel, 
Belfast." 

Belfast is the most like an American city of all we 
visited. Ship-building and linen-manufacturing are the 
chief industries. Here all of the great steamers of the 
famous White Star Line are built. The linen-manu- 
facturing is the most extensive in the world. Much of 
the day was spent in sight-seeing and shopping, there 
being so much temptation that Mr. Beecher cut short 
his afternoon nap. The lecture was an event in North- 
ern Ireland. The city presented the appearance of a 
holiday. I thought enthusiasm had reached its climax 
in London and Wales, but here we found something be- 
yond them. 

The Belfast Daily Telegraph thus describes the event: 

' ' The stately fabric of the Ulster Hall was yesterday even- 
ing an unusual source of attraction. From all parts of the 
town groups of people were eagerly speeding towards that 
great centre, and wherever two or three were gathered there 
the words ' Ward Beecher ' were ever heard above the bustle 
of the anxious throng; they were, indeed, the theme of almost 
every conversation. On approaching the exterior of the fine 
building it was found necessary to force one's way through a 
considerable multitude, and the vestibule once gained all 
seemed right. In the majority of cases it was so. But this 
was not the experience of him whose business or curiosity led 
him in the direction of the reserved seats, which were ap- 
proachable only through the eastern corridor. Hurrying on 
to the front, the attention of the passer-by was attracted by 
one who figured as a temporary obstructionist. He held a 



108 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

strong position beside the entrance to the great hall, and 
there, with an air of high authority, impeded the course of 
any person who metaphorically ' tossed not high his ready cap 
in air' and approached without fitting humility the pres- 
ence of one so curiously august. Entering the hall, a scene 
of great animation and expectancy awaited the observer. The 
balcony and the body of the hall were already well filled, and 
through its massive portals rolled a continuous stream of peo- 
ple to join the mighty sea of faces that already occupied the 
building. Before eight o'clock had tolled the sitting accom- 
modation of the commodious building was taxed to its utmost 
limits. The gathering was thoroughly representative. It 
contained members of every class, from the rich to the poor, 
and from the man of average intelligence to the man of cul- 
ture and refinement. There was also a large number of ladies, 
who added not a little to the liveliness of the place, and 
showed by their presence either that curiosity for which their 
sex is held in high repute, or, better still, their keen appreci- 
ation of the lecturer. As eight o'clock approached, the excite- 
ment became more and more intense. The slightest movement 
was sufficient to cause an almost universal projection of heads, 
and the faintest murmur was the signal for a general bustle 
to see the great man whose fame has reached us from afar 
off. 

"Shortly after eight o'clock there was a movement in the 
direction of the western ante-chamber, by means of which the 
platform is approached; noises were distinctly heard, and 
footsteps became audible. The excitement of the audience 
knew no bounds. Hats and umbrellas waved in all directions; 
pocket-handkerchiefs of many colors streamed fitfully from 
the balconies; heads bobbed to and fro like India-rubber balls; 
and opera-glasses were presented with lightning-like rapidity 
to brows from beneath whose shelter curious eyes peered at 
the approaching strangers. It was on such a scene as this 
that Dr. Collier and a number of reverend gentlemen entered, 
leading with them that venerable lecturer whose thoughts and 
sentiments have played such a conspicuous part in the educa- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 109 

tion and direction of the great thinkers of the New World. 
The enthusiastic applause was deafening in effect, and con- 
tinued unabated until the first faint lineaments of the power- 
ful and strongly-marked features of the lion of the evening 
became discernible. On his near approach the stately car- 
riage, the thick locks of long gray hair, the well-proportioned 
countenance beaming with intellectuality, the eyes sparkling 
like diamonds in the precious diadem that encircles a power- 
ful mind, were all impressed indelibly on the imaginations of 
the audience. At length the great ovation with which he was 
received subsided, and his well-built figure was seen to full 
advantage as he passed to a seat commanding a proper view 
of the audience. 

"The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher is apparently a man of 
much firmness. There is even in his gait something that im- 
presses one with the idea of decision and calmness. Nor are 
the notions thus formed exaggerated. These qualities, to- 
gether with clear perception, perfect self-control, vigor, and 
force, all stamp their owner as a man of genius. Mr. Beecher, 
who was dressed in a black frock-coat, turned-down collar, 
and black tie, is about five feet seven inches in height, but on 
a platform, no doubt owing to the manner in which he wears 
his hair, and the style of his features, he looks much taller. 
In the reserved area near the reporters' table two chairs had 
been placed a little out of the line of the front seats, and 
these a few moments before the lecturer made his appearance 
were quietly taken by Mrs. Beecher and Major Pond, Mr. 
Beecher's business manager. Mrs. Beecher is a quiet, pleas- 
ant-looking old lady, who in her youth must have been ex- 
ceedingly good-looking. She was tastefully and becomingly 
dressed, and appeared to thoroughly enjoy the reception ac- 
corded her distinguished husband. 

"Dr. Collier, who occupied the chair, introduced Mr. 
Beecher as one of the most celebrated members of a celebrated 
family, and a gentleman whose fame as an orator, editor, and 
author has been sounding not only in all churches, but in the 
wider realms of journalism, scholarship, and literature. They 



110 A SUMMEK IN ENGLAND 

recognized in him the physical embodiment of that great 
American nation whose welfare and whose history are so in- 
separably entwined with our own. They recognized in him a 
gentleman who in that country had made his mark, and they 
claimed kinship with him. They also recognized in him the 
fearless champion of the good tidings and good- will to all men. 
[Hear, hear!] He had fearlessly proclaimed that good gospel. 
Long might he do so, and they would gladly recognize in him 
the highest type of a clergyman who limited himself to no 
narrow groove, but strove to strike all the chords of our hu- 
man nature, and make them vibrate in loving response to the 
touch of Christian charity and toleration. [Applause.] 

"The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who was again enthusi- 
astically received, on approaching the audience planted his 
feet firmly, assumed the air of perfect homeliness, and then, 
folding his arms, gazed on the great assembly till their excite- 
ment had subsided. There was not a quiver of his lip, not a 
movement that revealed the slightest agitation, as he told his 
audience that that morning he had for the first time planted 
his feet on Ireland, with but one regret — that his time should 
be so limited that he could spend only a few hours where he 
should love to spend weeks and months; for the history of 
Ireland was not confined to their knowledge. They had heard 
of them on the other side — [Laughter] — and since they could 
not come to Ireland, Ireland had come in overflowing liberality 
to them. [Laughter.] He had also heard of the prosperity 
of this good city, and although he had not been able to ex- 
plore it, and should not be able, he feared to take more than 
a glance at it : even that was better than nothing; and he 
doubted not he should go away with admiration and with re- 
newed sympathy for Northern Ireland and for this metropolis 
of the North." 

Each Belfast paper commented with equal enthusiasm, 
and published the lecture entire. At the close of the 
lecture Mr. Beecher said he did not know whether he 
had any Irish blood in him or not. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. m 

"He had got a little Welsh and a good deal of English 
blood. One thing he did feel : that if he had not a drop of 
English blood, and no Scotch nor Welsh blood, he was blood- 
kindred to his kind, to mankind everywhere throughout the 
whole world. [Applause.] He felt a profound interest in 
Great Britain. This great kingdom would unfold itself out 
of the past into a still more glorious future than it ever yet 
had. [Applause.] The language which belonged to this dear 
old nation was spread over the world, and Britain, America, 
and the Colonial English were more than a match for all the 
world put together. [Cheers.] Did they ever think what a 
reservoir there was in their control, what a reservoir the Eng- 
lish language was — its poetry, its history, its philosophy, its 
religion ? They had a language as capable as any that was 
ever spoken. Their institutions were expressed and explained 
by it, and their political principles and political economy went 
with the language. Was it a small thing or an indication of 
Divine Providence that the English people were the only peo- 
ple in this world that could colonize and form States that 
would last ? The history of colonization was entirely the his- 
tory of the English-speaking people, and they did not seem 
disposed to forget their trade. [Laughter and applause.] 
They were going everywhere. Let them never suffer division 
or irritation, or. above all, the black demon of war to come in 
their midst. Let them stand together in one language, in the 
one general faith, in the one hope for mankind, in the one 
unchanging principle of liberty, and go on from conquering to 
conquer. [Applause.] 

"Kev. John Fordice moved and Kev. G. R. Wedgwood 
seconded a vote of thanks to the lecturer, which passed by ac- 
clamation. A similar compliment to the chairman terminated 
the proceedings. 

' ' As the reverend gentleman and his wife left the hall they 
were met by a large assembly, who cheered enthusiastically 
for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, who gracefully re- 
turned their acknowledgment and quickly disappeared in the 
eastern corridor.' 1 



112 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

The following morning Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were 
entertained at a breakfast in the Lombard Hall, Belfast. 
There were a large number of friends,, including many 
clergymen and ladies. It was a most enjoyable affair. 
The time after the breakfast until 4 p.m. was occupied 
in driving about the city in company with Rev. Mr. 
Fordice, visiting numerous places of interest, not the 
least among which were the scenes of the late riot. At 
4 o'clock we left Belfast for Dublin, where we ar- 
rived at 10.30, amidst rain and mud and wind and dark- 
ness. We found comfortable accommodations at the 
Gresham Hotel, and supper and a number of letters 
from friends in England waiting for us. The next 
morning Mr. and Mrs. Beecher visited the Dublin Bo- 
tanical Gardens, which they declared the most interest- 
ing place of the kind they had ever seen. Two hours 
were spent at these tropical conservatories, and then a 
drive through the great park back to Guinnesses Brew- 
ery. It was not visitors' day. We were ushered into a 
large reception-parlor, while I hunted up the superin- 
tendent, to whom I quietly intimated who the distin- 
guished visitors were, and asked for a suspension of the 
rule, that we might see the greatest establishment of the 
kind in the world. The manager was quite pleased 
with the opportunity, and at once came to Mr. Beecher 
and, after cordially receiving the party, asked: 
' ' Would you like to see the brewery, sir?" 
"I would. How long will it take?" asked Mr. 
Beecher. 

"About a -week, sir, if you have nothing else to do." 
"1 will take as much as I can see in an hour," said 
Mr. Beecher, and we started. It did not take long for 
our guide to learn that there was nothing for Mr. Beech- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 113 

er to learn as to the process of brewing ale and porter. 
He (Mr. Beecher) remarked that once on a time he had 
to undergo great nervous strain, and his physician rec- 
ommended that he drink a bottle of stout every night. 
So he set about to ascertain what it was made of and 
how it was made. 

After visiting some of the principal departments of 
this wonderful establishment, we learned that the ground 
it occupied consists of forty-six acres in the heart 
of Dublin. Six miles of underground railroad-tracks 
traverse the various vaults. Twelve thousand men are 
employed on the premises. Hundreds of horses and 
wagons, and many ships, are in the establishment's ser- 
vice. The daily revenue paid to the government is 
£15,000 ($75,000) a day for stamps. 

I have frequently wondered to myself if the Dublin 
lecture was truly a success. 

Mr. Frederick Windee had agreed to pay me eighty 
pounds for the lecture. Who Mr. Windee was I did 
not know, except that his references were good. He 
wrote me when I made the engagement that "The 
Eeign of the Common People" would not do for Ireland. 
The subject smacked of politics, and it would not do to 
advertise it in Dublin. The " Institution" would risk 
" Wastes and Burdens of Society," which I did not ob- 
ject to, and I knew Mr. Beecher would not. 

On our arrival, a little shrewd-faced Irishman met me 
at the hotel and introduced himself as Mr. Windee. He 
was very polite, but seemed quite nervous. He seemed 
to fear that Mr. Beecher was a dangerous man for Dub- 
lin, but hoped he would not make a mistake. I assured 
him that there was not the slightest cause for fear. He 
had the money, eighty pounds, in Irish bills, and gave 
8 



114 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

it to me then and there. I asked him who was to pre- 
side. He told me the Eev. Mr. Morrison had consented, 
and he did hope Mr. Beecher would be very careful 
about referring in any way to religion or politics in his 
lecture. I had to tell Mr. Beecher what the feeling 
was. He said nothing. 

He and I drove to Metropolitan Hall, where we found 
a large audience waiting. Mr. Beecher was introduced 
to the chairman, Eev. S. Gr. Morrison, a somewhat patri- 
archal divine, who without ceremony, and with great un- 
certainty, conducted the lecturer to the platform, where 
he sat down to as cold a reception as I ever knew him to 
receive. All was silent. The chairman rose and said : 

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honor to introduce to 
you a distinguished orator from Yankeeland. Mr. Beecher is 
not on this platform in his clerical character, so we are not to 
be treated to any exposition of his theological sentiments. Mr. 
Beecher is not here as a politician, and therefore we will not 
hear from him any exposition of his political principles. 
[Hear, hear! and applause.] But Mr. Beecher is hereto de- 
liver an address of more than ordinary social importance. As 
a well-known philanthropist, from his long experience, from 
the wonderful abilities the Great Master has gifted him with, 
and from his well-known character as one of the most dis- 
tinguished orators, we may anticipate, I think, an address — 
a lecture — that shall not only be instructive but delightful. I 
have great pleasure in introducing Mr. Beecher to your notice 
this evening." [Applause.] 

Mr. Beecher, on coming forward, was received with 
courteous but not cordial applause. He said : 

" I have been very kindly introduced by the distinguished 
and honorable gentleman who has accompanied me, and there- 
fore I accept the position assigned. I have not come to speak 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 115 

on theology, and yon shall never know how much you have 
missed. [Laughter.] I have not come to speak on politics. 
I have enough of that in my own country — [Laughter] — and 
even if I knew about your politics, I should think it very inex- 
pedient, as one born abroad, to meddle with local affairs and 
local questions. I know that it is not necessary for one to 
know much about politics in order to make a good speaker; 
but, nevertheless, I accept the delimitation, and there is noth- 
ing left of me but this — that I am a man; that's enough. 'A 
man's a man for a' that.' And as to the other things, I give 
them a go-by, in the hope that some twenty or thirty years 
hence I may revisit you, and that you then will be very glad to 
hear my opinions about those other subjects." [Applause.] 

Mr. Beecher gave his lecture in one of his character- 
istic moods, caused by an attempt to confine him within 
certain bounds. The audience soon had reason to be- 
lieve that he had in some way, perhaps unconsciously, 
woven a great deal of religion and politics into the lec- 
ture; at least the chairman told me after the lecture 
that he could see and feel it all through. The Dublin 
papers published the lecture entire the next Monday. 
The Freeman's Journal headed the report with a col- 
umn editorial as follows : 

"Last evening the Dublin public, or as many of them as 
could conveniently fit inside the Metropolitan Hall, were of- 
fered an opportunity of hearing the famous Kev. Henry Ward 
Beecher. The occasion was one of very exceptional interest, 
for there are very few people to whom the name of the great 
preacher and lecturer is not familiar, and his life has been 
eventful enough to make it a subject of comment and criticism 
to all sorts and conditions of people all the world over. In 
America, of course, it is quite necessary to say he is not only 
' one of the most remarkable men of the country, ' but that he 
has long since become an absolute hero — a sort of transatlan- 



116 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND ' 

tic ' white-haired boy ' amongst a very large section of Yan- 
kees. Like many other able men whose capacity lay very 
much in the same direction, he has ever combined a shrewd 
regard for business, as developed by the acquisition of the al- 
mighty dollar, with a very worthy occupation of ' spreading 
the light.' And so, having put himself under the manage- 
ment of a cute and careful agent, a personage sometimes ob- 
scured under the foreign and formidable title of impressario, 
the Kev. Henry has lectured and lectured to the tune of many 
thousands of pounds. And this, after all, is as it should be. 
The lectures, judging from that of last night, are well worth 
paying to hear, to say nothing of the fact that people really 
never properly appreciate anything that is given to them 
for nothing. Besides, an honest charge for admission, even 
to hear an American preacher, is better and, so to speak, 
more comfortable than the too-familiar invitation that ' all 
friends are welcome — there will be no charge for admission, 
but to defray expenses there will be a collection at the door.' 
The Metropolitan Hall, or, as it is now called, the Christian 
Union Building, was densely crowded, and the greatest anx- 
iety was manifested to hear and see the distinguished orator, 
even amongst a considerable number of people who can scarce- 
ly be called frequenters or patrons of that establishment. 
Every one desired to meet the man of whom it is said that he 
once addressed an adverse meeting 'for six hours at a 
stretch, and sent them away raving Liberationists. ' Most 
audiences upon whom six hours of oratory happened to be 
poured would possibly be sent away raving lunatics. But the 
power and influence of real eloquence is unlimited, and so the 
Rev. Mr. Beecher can boast that he never wearies his audi- 
ence. 

" It is not very easy to describe his personal appearance so 
as to give any true idea of his look as he ' delivers in such apt 
and gracious words ' the text of his discourse. In a certain 
sense he may be said to be a typical lecturer; for somehow or 
another, whatever be the reason, those of his cloth who have 
visited this country seem to affect very much the same airs 



WITH HENKY WARD BEECHER. 117 

and graces, and, whether it is the occupation of the public 
lecturing or the indefinable ' something ' in the atmosphere of 
the country, the general bearing of such men has a singular 
family likeness the one to the other. But, as Galatea naively 
observes of herself, Henry Ward Beecher is ' original. ' For 
one of his age — he is over seventy-three — he is uncommonly 
well preserved. Somewhat under the middle size, his figure 
is well set up, though perhaps too stout to be deemed athletic; 
but his frame is still firm, strong, vigorous. His head is 
large, well shaped, and indicates intellectual qualities of a 
high order. There is much in his florid face that a good por- 
trait-painter would rejoice to find in a subject. The features 
are well defined, the nose being somewhat aquiline and promi- 
nent, the eyes bright, full of expression, and marked by a 
keenness and shrewdness, and the mouth suggestive of one 
who has little of the ascetic in his nature and who can appre- 
ciate the sweets and comforts of existence as well as lecture 
against their abuses. There is a strange mixture of shrewd- 
ness and tenderness, humor, playfulness and sympathy, in- 
tricately blended with those severer moods that ' refuse and 
restrain.' Add a thin crop of gray hair brushed well back 
from the forehead and falling with a sort of studied negli- 
gence to his broad shoulders, and perhaps some slight notion 
may be had of the lecturer. That he has a keen sense of 
humor is obvious. Even so small an incident as a big man 
sitting down on another man's hat did not escape his appreci- 
ation. (Such an incident did occur on the platform.) . . . 
He was dressed in fine black cloth, wore a turn-down collar, 
commonly called a 'Shakespeare,' with a black tie, and dis- 
played an impressive expanse of white shirt. 

"His theme was 'The Wastes and Burdens of Society,' 
which he treated from the standpoint of political economy, 
without going into the subject at all fully; for that, as he ob- 
served, 'would find them all there in the morning, — asleep.' 
He speaks with a decided but by no means strongly flavored 
American accent, or ' twang ' as Artemus Ward calls it. His 
sentences are for the most part short, crisp, and wonderfully 



118 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

effective. Though seldom raising his voice beyond a very or- 
dinary key, his words are heard with singular clearness and 
distinctness. His humor is dry and thoroughly though inde- 
scribably American. ... 

"Whatever of useful truth his address contained — and it 
contained much matter for reflection— he made strikingly at- 
tractive and interesting by his method of telling it. He treated 
the subject not only with great clearness, originality, and 
force, but occasionally with an eloquence that rather sur- 
prised his audience. His illustrations of the mistaken treat- 
ment of the young in their start on the journey of life were 
listened to with great interest, and were very impressive. 
Occasionally, too, they were quaintly humorous. One man, 
he said, would observe of his child, ' He is clear-headed and 
honest; we had better make a lawyer of him: ' and they did; 
and he failed at his profession. Other parents, beholding 
that their child was 'so good,' said they would make him a 
clergyman. 'They did; and his parish learned patience.' 
Such forms of phraseology as, 'An ignorant man is a man 
unpacked,' punctuated, so to speak, sentiments, advice, and 
opinions of a very weighty and practical character. Though 
his expression that if Irishmen in America ' survive whiskey 
for ten years ' they make good citizens was scarcely taken in a 
good spirit, his subsequent tribute to the gifts of our country- 
men formed a sufficient antidote. One of the common char- 
acteristics of his style is the fact that the conclusion of sen- 
tences contained more or less startling surprises. Thus he 
described with great impressiveness how he had stood on 
platforms in peace and good-will with clergymen of Koman 
Catholic, Protestant, Moravian, Presbyterian, and other per- 
suasions — ' when the subject wasn't religion. ' Whenever he 
had anything pungent, or scored a point that went home, or 
met appreciation, his face lit up wonderfully; and though he 
never laughed, and seldom even smiled, the humor of his own 
thought was clearly reflected in his face. The audience lis- 
tened with rapt attention to the address, and applauded por- 
tions of it frequently and warmly. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 119 

' ' The only incident in the nature of an interruption was by 
no means an unwelcome or inappropriate one. He was allud- 
ing to the devastating influence of the seeds of war scattered 
throughout the world, and mentioned that whilst England had 
her lion, another nation her bear, another her eagle, and so 
on, no nation in the world had a lamb or symbol of peace on 
its banner. At this one of the auditors cried out, ' Ireland 
has her harp.' This gave rise to a wonderful outburst of 
cheering; and when the applause ceased, Mr. Beecher, who 
really seemed quite moved by the suggestiveness of the re- 
minder, said, ' Yes, Ireland has her harp; but alas that the 
harp should be largely employed in dirges! It wails, it sor- 
rows for the past, is sad for the future. Yet Ireland has her 
harp; thank God for it ! ' 

' ' He spoke for about an hour and twenty minutes. The 
interest of his hearers not only never for a moment flagged, 
but on the contrary it grew greater as the address proceeded, 
and, unlike a not uncommon experience at lectures, there 
were few present who did not feel regret when the end was 
reached." 



The last lecture of the tour had been delivered ; there 
was much hand-shaking : the people had got as thor- 
oughly warm as they dared. Mr. Beecher was jolly and 
happy as he extended his hand to the hesitating people 
who gathered around him, seemingly wishing and hop- 
ing, but scarcely venturing, to approach him. " Come 
right along/' he said; " this is my good-by shake. I 
am glad to see you. - " 

"We rode back to our hotel. Mrs. Beecher had supper 
in waiting. We were going to Queenstown to-morrow, 
and would be on our way home to America. 

"Mother, Pond will have to behave himself now; we 
are no longer under his despotic rule. The tyrant! I 
guess we'd better not give him any supper.-" 



120 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

" I don't want to desert him here/' said Mrs. Beeeher; 
" we had better get out of Ireland first ." 

" But he has domineered over us all summer. You 
have been in bondage so long you cannot appreciate 
freedom; you deserve to be kept in slavery." 

And so we had our small jokes and enjoyed ourselves. 
Never were three people more happy. Mr. Beeeher re- 
minded me that this was not the first time we had 
knocked off, a day at a time, a long lecture tour. 

Early the next morning we left Dublin for Queens- 
town, where we arrived at 12 o'clock, having travelled 
five hours through desolate Ireland; and indeed it was a 
land of desolation, poverty, and starvation. We did not 
see where even a garden had been worked the past sea- 
son. Tall grass and weeds, broken hedges, gates ajar 
and askew, windows stuffed with rags, and half-starved 
women and children huddling together in open door- 
ways of the poor tenement hovels like flocks of sheep in 
a storm, — this was the condition of affairs that prevailed 
outside of the cities. 

At Queenstown we had to spend the Saturday after- 
noon and night at the Queen's Hotel. The contrast be- 
tween the "Imperial" at Belfast and the es QueenV at 
Queenstown is about the same as the difference between 
the thrifty northern city and the poverty-stricken south 
of Ireland, in general. 

Mr. and Mrs. Beeeher busied themselves reading and 
answering letters that were awaiting our arrival — good- 
by messages from friends in every part of the Kingdom. 
Later on Mr. Beeeher and I strolled about the place, 
yielded to earnest appeals from shopkeepers to examine 
some specimens of Irish lace, and before we knew it 
several purchases were made. 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 121 

The shrewd Irish women shopkeepers here play the 
blarney very freely on the Americans. Mr. Beecher was 
identified by a very bright one, who asked if she were 
not correct in her guess as to his identity. He acknowl- 
edged it, and she was very happy to serve him. Many 
of her friends in America had told her about him; she 
had many friends there. She interested Mr. Beecher 
by relating incidents of the number of years she had 
witnessed the departure of emigrants from this point for 
America: not a ship for years that had not taken more 
or less; and some of the scenes of parents parting with 
their children were heart-rending. 

Sunday morning, October 24th, we awoke in Queens- 
town, and saw the Etruria anchored in the harbor, and 
the tender coming ashore for mail and passengers. She 
was to make three trips, and we had no need to hurry; 
but so anxious were we to be on our journey home that 
we took the first boat, and at 9 o'clock were on board, 
where we found my brother, much improved in health, 
and many friends returning by the same steamer. We 
found another crowd of passengers as great as that we 
had come over with, all happy, having had a good time, 
and anxious to get home. We were under way at 1.30. 
As we steamed out of Queenstown Harbor the day was 
bright and fair. All passengers were on deck. The 
gong sounded for dinner, and the crowd rushed for the 
tables. 

" Mother," said Mr. Beecher, " let's take a farewell 
look at Ireland. Poor Ireland! Poor Ireland!" I saw 
that the expression came from the depths of his inner- 
most soul. 

At 6 o'clock we came into a rough sea. Passengers 
retired early, and the majority of them did not get up 



122 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 

until the Saturday following. I relate no incidents of 
that rough voyage. Jonah must haye been left behind. 
I know no other reason why we did not all perish. 

We landed in New York Sunday evening, October 
31st. the weather cold and wet and very disagreeable. 
Friends had stood on the wharf for hours to welcome 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher. Reporters attacked Mr. Beech- 
er from all quarters; but he had nothing to say that day 
to the reporters, took his carriage, and went directly to 
his home in Brooklyn. 

I asked him before he landed if he should look in on 
the church that day. He said 'No; the church could 
stand it for another week: but he would like to be there 
in time to run around to the different Sabbath-schools 
and see the children. He thought they would like to see 
him. He arrived home at 1 o'clock, and at 3 went out 
to visit all the Sabbath-schools connected with Plymouth 
Church, to the great delight and joy of all the children. 

Between the 4th of July and the 21st of October — 
fifteen and a half weeks — Mr. Beecher preached seven- 
teen times, delivered nine public addresses, and fifty- 
eight lectures. For the fifty-eight lectures he cleared 
the sum of $11,600, net of all expenses for himself and 
Mrs. Beecher from the day they sailed from New York, 
June 19th, to the day they arrived at their home in 
Brooklyn, October 31st. That was his summer vaca- 
tion. 

It was not the largest year's work I have known Mr. 
Beecher to accomplish. The best season I recollect was 
during the season of 1876 and '77. Between September 
21, 1876, and May 14, 1877— thirty-three and a half 
weeks — Mr. Beecher delivered one hundred and thirty- 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 123 

five lectures, travelling upwards of twenty-seven thou- 
sand miles; returned regularly to his church in Brooklyn 
to attend his Friday-evening meeting, with the excep- 
tion of eight of the thirty-four Fridays, and to his 
pulpit every Sabbath excepting six (during his long 
Western tour) ; and on one Sabbath, later, he preached 
in Louisville, Ky. That same season he preached sixty- 
eight sermons in his own pulpit, delivered twenty- 
eight Friday-evening prayer-meeting talks in Plymouth 
Church, and addressed several legislative bodies and edu- 
cational institutions during his lecture-travel. Thus 
he lectured and preached two hundred and thirty-two 
times in two hundred and thirty-five days. The number 
of people that he addressed (estimating the audiences 
to average two thousand people) was four hundred and 
sixty thousand in the short space of seven months. 
This is the most remarkable record of which I ever had 
any knowledge. 



124 A SUMMER IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE END. 

Mr. Beecher died of apoplexy at his residence in 
Brooklyn on Tuesday, March 8, 1887, at 9.40 a.m. The 
private funeral was held at 9.30 a.m. on the following 
Thursday, at his late home, where none but members of 
the family were present. The public funeral took place 
at Plymouth Church at 10.30 a.m. on Friday, the 11th. 
In accordance with the request so often repeated by Mr» 
Beecher, the funeral services were entirely under the 
direction of his friend, the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Hall, 
of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn, who con- 
ducted the simple and impressive ceremonies at the 
house of mourning, and also at the church in which 
the world-renowned preacher and orator had earned 
fame and universal love. Dr. Hall's public address 
was a model of simplicity, dignity, and manly pathos. 
He rose to the height of the occasion, and without a 
sign of exaggerated rhetoric impressed every mind with 
the greatness of the man who had departed, and com- 
forted every loving heart under his firm yet tender 
touch. Mr. Beecher's ideas of the fitness of things 
were never more signally confirmed than by his choice 
of Dr. Hall, "to bury, not to praise him." 

Surging crowds thronged the neighboring thorough- 
fares. The streets in all directions were filled with the 
sorrowing multitude, who stood in line for hours with a 



WITH HENRY WARD BEECHER. 125 

hope of viewing once more the face of their departed 
friend. When the funeral pageant entered Plymouth 
Church the interior of the great structure was blooming 
like an immense bower of flowers and living things. 
Evergreens and roses, smilax and blossoming vines, 
greeted those who entered. It seemed, indeed, the 
ushering of the dead into the realm of life ! Lying in 
state during two days the body was viewed by thousands 
of men, women, and children — the estimated number 
was over one hundred thousand. The crush to gain one 
glimpse of the remains was terrible, and in the short 
space of time which the committee in charge allotted to 
the public to look upon their departed, but a compara- 
tively small number secured the desired opportunity. 

"On Saturday, March 12th," says the Brooklyn Citizen, 
" Henry Ward Beecher's body was buried in Greenwood. His 
hearse was followed in sympathy and honor by millions of his 
countrymen. The mourners were of all kindred and of every 
language. Not in this generation, at least, has there been a 
funeral so nobly significant. In the stately procession walked 
the viewless forms of principles, of governments, of nations, 
and of races. The guardian spirit of the slave whom he helped 
to liberate; the fair, sad genius of the Green Isle, for which he 
so often and so eloquently pleaded; the dusky representative 
of the Chinese Empire, in behalf of whose sons he again and 
again demanded justice; the fair form of modern science with 
the radiance of the morning sun on her queenly brow; the 
benign angel of charity, clothed in the whiteness of that purity 
which renders sin invisible; Democracy, with her free step, 
flowing hair, and cap of many hues; Columbia, full of ma- 
tronly grace and benignant as the atmosphere of June; and 
Christianity, calm, motherly, and forgiving — these are the 
pall-bearers by whom the body of our hero was borne to its 
resting-place." 



ADDRESSES. 



RECEPTION BY AMERICANS IN 
LONDON. 



On Friday evening, July 9, Mr. Beecher was entertained 
at dinner at the Hotel Metropole, given by Mr. Henry F. 
Gillig, President of the American Exchange, which occupies 
centres of great and growing influence in New York, in London, 
in Liverpool, and in Paris. The banquet was one of the 
choicest description. The company numbered about eighty, 
comprising representative American gentlemen in London, as 
well as English clergymen and gentlemen of fame and power. 
The gathering in the sumptuous saloon before the dinner-hour 
was one of peculiar interest, as guest met guest and new friend- 
ships were formed. This most beautiful of our new hotels 
seemed to be crowded with visitors, for ladies and gentlemen 
were found thronging the spacious corridors, brilliant with 
flowers, as the Beecher party went from the drawing-room to 
the Oak Boom, where the dinner was served. Mr. Gillig, of 
course, presided, and proposed most of the toasts given between 
the songs and solos. "The Queen" and "The President of 
the United States " came closely together, the National Anthem 
and "The Star-spangled Banner" following. The toast to 
Mr. Beecher received full honour by the guests rising and 
cheering. In reply he said : 

Wherever my name is mentioned, it generally 
makes a great noise, but not always so agreeable as 
to-night. I am here, gentlemen, this evening, on 
the invitation of Mr. Gillig, and I have to thank 
yon for the courteous reception which yon have 
given me. I cannot say precisely as Mr. William 
Lloyd Garrison said, who, when after the war was 
over and the emancipation accomplished, received 
courtesies which he had never received before, 
and was presented at a public dinner with a gold 



4 EECEPTION BY 

watch. As lie took it in his hand he said, " Gentle- 
men, if this had been a rotten egg, I should have 
known what to do, but as it is a gold watch I have 
nothing to say." I am here under more auspicious 
circumstances, for I have lived to see the desire of 
my life and the object of my prayer answered in 
the United States. The profoundest instincts of a 
people always ripen into a sentiment of love of 
liberty — liberty, not in its wilder state, not so much 
an uncontrolled and unorganised individual liberty, 
as that through society the individual gains for him- 
self more than he could out of society, and so that 
society will be strong which is in proportion to the 
genius and strength of each individual who consti- 
tutes it. Against all these desires arose that cloud 
no bigger than a man's hand, for in my youth 
slavery was yet in existence. I saw it spread in the 
air, its thunder and the flash of lightning were con- 
tinually blinding our eyes. I lived to see the great 
controversy in which men never spoke in the same 
breath, but spoke from the very heart to the very 
heart ; I lived to see the folly of this democracy pre- 
cipitating war; I lived to see the war complete 
itself, and upon a scale unparalleled in modern times ; 
I lived to see our land involved at the end of it, in a 
loss of thousands of lives, and the debt raised to 
more than six thousand millions of dollars, and I 
lived to see almost the whole of that wiped out by 
the living industry of the people. I have lived to 
see the discordant feeling of antagonism and fearful 
animosity which sprang up between North and 
South almost entirely dissipated. There never was 
such a union as there is to-day between the North 
and South, and that, too, in a lifetime of but half 
a generation it may said, for while there be many 
old men who cannot get out of beaten tracks, 
the young and middle-aged and enterprising of 
the South are all of one mind. It is not a political 



AMEEICANS IN LONDON. 5 

sham or pretence that they make when they say 
they are really happy, and I myself, in travelling 
through the States of the South not two years ago, 
stood in the presence of audiences which contained 
some of the best of people. And I have yet to find 
a Southern man who will give a vote to restore 
slavery. Nor have the coloured men been not pro- 
perly and justly treated; they have had national 
arrangements for education, but above all, the Chris- 
tian Churches, North and South, have taken them 
up, and no part of our population is at present more 
carefully attended to than are the coloured people of 
the South. From one single society, the American 
Missionary Society, is sent forth every year more 
than 1,000 educated coloured people for teachers 
amongst the coloured people of the South. There 
are many other facts connected with this that it 
might be pertinent to speak of; but time presses.. 
In regard to our land in general, although there is. 
enough to make discord and discontent, yet the 
aspect for the future is to me very cheering. You- 
must bear in mind that the whole world is like the 
Nile, and New York is like the delta of the Nile. 
Immense quantities of soil come down, slimy, thick, 
and unwholesome, and is deposited on the land; 
but a few years go on and it makes the land rich. 
In the same way emigration is about the richest 
substance with which we can manure our land ; for 
of those who come over to the United States with 
virtuous intent and build places for themselves and 
their children, there is not one unwelcome any- 
where. We have almost depopulated Iceland, we 
are making a large drain upon the Scandinavian 
population of the north, upon Scotchmen and upon 
Englishmen, and there have been some Irishmen. 
We have room for them all. It is true in regard to 
our children of the Green Isle that they are more 
enterprising in elections than we are ; they poll 



6 EECEPTION BY 

early and often ; but voting, gentlemen, is an art. 
It is like rifle-shooting— a man misses a good many 
times before he learns to hit. In time, if the Irish- 
man resists whisky, by the time he has voted ten 
years or so he will learn to vote as well as any one 
else. As for that matter, there is a great prejudice 
against admitting foreigners to the right of the 
suffrage until they learn how to vote ; but I 
do not believe any man ever learned to swim on 
the land, and the way to learn how to vote is 
to vote and keep voting. We are very content 
with the gifts that are sent to us, but we are not very 
well content to accept that part of your population 
which you send to us in the faith of Mormon. We 
do not like the Mormons, and we won't have them ; 
that is to say, we will not have Mormon polygamy. 
They have a right to their own opinion ; they have 
a right to liberty of speech and conscience ; but 
they have no right to liberty of conduct when it goes 
against the Law and Constitution. A process is 
going on by which that, too, will pass away, for you 
must take in this, gentlemen, that in an enlightened 
community, with self-government, there are the 
same temptations to evil and mischief which exist 
under any other government. I have taken notice 
that in a community that has intelligence and ab- 
solute liberty, that while evils come upon us, 
when the evil comes we can put it out. The 
remedial power of liberty is one of its great 
virtues. We are now finding that 'out, for we have a 
great many statesmen sent us from Germany and the 
Continental states, Nihilists and Socialists, and even 
they are perfectly welcome. They walk and talk up 
and down the street, and we say : " Gentlemen, we 
are indebted to you for a very great deal ; to you on 
the Continent — you sent us your masters in classics, 
you sent us your masters in music, you sent them to 
us, and we thank you for a thousand gifts which 



AMERICANS IN LONIXDN. 7 

cannot be too highly appreciated ; but when you 
send us men to teach us how to build free cities, we 
do not thank you." We have built a commonwealth 
which will stand through life, and we pass on 
through a hundred years, and its institutions never 
were so strong as they are to-day. Indeed, those 
modern constructionists who build up air castles 
have a poor time with us, and when they undertake 
"to carry out the more destructive malignant forms, 
we let them talk until they begin to shoot and 
burn, and then we put our foot down upon them 
like we would upon a wasp. If you can find any 
quicker justice than that which has been given to 
those men in New York and Cincinnati, I would 
like you to point it out. It has been thought by 
some that stronger and more centralised institutions 
are quite essential to Conservatism in the country, 
but I contend that nowhere in the world is there 
more sensible Conservatism than that which exists 
in a free country. The law is nowhere more sound 
than with us ; it is the voice of the people, and, 
although we may delay long — because we have a 
very high conception of humanity — yet the law is 
sure, and it honours itself and saves communities from 
the mischief it was meant to save them from. I have 
been asked since I came here to express my opinions 
in regard to a good many things. Well, gentlemen, 
I have an opinion about a good many things. I have 
not thought it expedient to let you know what they 
are. I have only this to say, that when you come to 
our genuine American and ask him what he thinks, 
not of literature, but of the alphabet, he looks you in 
the face and almost thinks you insult him, but when 
you ask him what he thinks is alphabetical in our 
country and has been so for 100 years, I can scarcely 
help smiling when I say that he will answer: "If 
you want me to meddle with your affairs I will not 
say anything." Well, gentlemen, I think I have a 



8 EECEPTION BY 

right to speak in that land which I have never for- 
sworn, and which I have never ceased to love, for I 
am of England, although I live in America ; if my 
emigrant ancestors had not heen in a hurry I should 
have been born here. I claim the right of a foreign 
Englishman or any other local name you may choose 
to apply. I have a right to my opinions, and on all 
proper occasions I express them, and when I do 
express them I have been always able to let folks 
know exactly what I mean. I have a right to speak 
here because all the world is brought so near together 
that nothing can happen in the remotest corner of 
the globe, that it does not instantly become the 
conversation of the whole civilised world. Do you 
suppose that you can make any passage from the 
lower to the higher stage of civilisation and we not 
know it? Do you think anything can take place 
in Great Britain that is not of interest to us on the 
other side ? We are looking at your affairs now 
going on, we are now looking at you and your 
statesmen, from the crown on the head of your 
revered and most beloved and honoured Queen, whom 
we esteem almost as much as you do, and upon your 
statesmen and their opinions, and their careers, for 
it is a part of our civilisation, and it is a part of our 
right to rejoice when they are right, and not to re- 
joice when they are wrong, for even in Great Britain 
sometimes men are wrong. For I suppose there may 
have been, or is to be, a time when public men will 
be angels. But that has not been reached by us, 
and we scarcely think that you have reached it on 
your side. Of the result of those things going on in 
your land let me say this, that it is a matter of pro- 
found consideration with us that you are taking the 
lead among the nations on this side. All the world 
has felt that the cause of God should rise and go 
higher. All the world knows that intelligence is 
spreading downwards, and that the masses of men 



• AMERICANS IN LONDON. 9 

are beginning to read and think, and that an out- 
burst of enterprise is going on in the civilised world. 
And these changes, which are taking place in France, 
in Germany, in Italy, and in Eussia, will take place 
until He shall come to reign. The wave has swept 
across you. There was a time when such an interest 
and commotion would have broken out into a revo- 
lution, and there was a time when it would have 
broken out into the heat of a fiercely fighting reform, 
but the transition is with you as mild and gradual 
as is the change from winter into spring, and from 
spring into summer, and from summer into the 
abundance of autumn. God bless Great Britain in 
the labours she has now undergone, and I can only 
express my feeling and say, may they be for the 
furtherance of the right of the whole people ; may 
they give additional strength to the nation and be 
an example and an illumination to all the peoples of 
the world. Let me say one thing more. I was very 
much struck with what M. Laveleye said at the 
Mansion House the other night. He said that, going 
through history, this was the only instance which 
had occurred in the history of nations, where we see 
a great people divided into two energetic and enthu- 
siastic parties, neither the one nor the other striving 
for an extension of territory, or striving for the sub- 
jugation of the weak, nor for the acquisition of public 
wealth or honour, but fighting with each other as to 
who shall determine to do the most justice to a part 
of their own dominions. It is with them a question 
of justice and equity, some thinking this way to be 
the best, and others thinking that way to be the best,, 
but both filled with the desire to do that which is 
best. I thank you again, gentlemen, for the courteous 
reception you have given me. It will be, I think, 
received on the other side also very largely with 
gratification, for while in my time I have received the 
compliments of my own people in every shape, I 



10 EECEPTION BY AMEEICANS IN LONDON. 

think now I have got old and strifes are nearly done, 
they are disposed yet to give me their confidence 
with open heart. It will be a lasting memory that 
I have been among you and looked upon your faces 
and felt your pulse and received from you such kind 
and courteous sympathy. 

The other speakers of the evening were Canon Fleming, 
Rev. Mr. Haweis, Dr. Parker, Mr. Wyld, Mr. Justice 
Matthews, Sir T.'Chambees, and the Hon. T. N". Waller. 
The guests separated soon after eleven o'clock, having spent a 
memorable time. 



Some characteristic letters were received from certain of the 
gentlemen unable to attend. For example, Dean Bradley 
wrote : — 

" It is most kind of you to invite me to dinner to meet Mr. 
Beecher. I much regret that I am engaged at home that 
evening. I wonder whether he would care to join a party of 
' Colonials ' to go over the Abbey with me on Friday next. 
Perhaps he would like to come to next Sunday's Nave Service, 
and hear the Bishop of Peterborough, and stay afterwards to a 
light supper." 

Mr. Henry Irving wrote : — 

" I should be delighted to accept your invitation if I were not 
cut off from such pleasure by the necessity of being at the 
theatre and on the stage just as you are sitting down to table. 
Playing the devil is very well (though it is rather warm now, 
even for Mephistopheles), but I would much rather be with 
you and our friend Beecher, than whom there is no man higher 
in my esteem. It is a good thing for English people that they 
have the opportunity of getting such a stimulus from the visit 
of a man who is so striking a representative of the Independent 
Genius of America.'"' 



RECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 



On Monday morning, August 30, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher 
were invited to meet at breakfast some fifty or sixty members 
of an Association of ministers of Baptist, Congregational, and 
Evangelical Union churches in Glasgow. Dr. and Mrs. 
Parker were in Scotland (the Doctor preaching in Edin- 
burgh on Sunday), and the opportunity was taken to invite 
them on the same occasion. An excellent breakfast was 
served at the Oockburn Temperance Hotel, the chair being 
taken by Rev. Dr. F. Ferguson (Montrose-street E.U. Church), 
and there were also present, in addition to the guests of 
the day, Rev. Dr. Flett (Storie-street, Paisley), Rev. Dr. 
Morison (North Dundas-street E.U.), Rev. A. Goodrich (the 
minister of the Congregational church at which Mr. Beecher 
preached), Rev. J. Coats (Govan Baptist Church), Rev. J. 
.Ross (Eglinton Congregational Church), Rev. W. H. Elliott 
(South-side Baptist Church, and secretary of the Association), 
Rev. R. Wallace (Go van-hill E.U.), Rev. A. Cowe (Hillhead 
Congregational), Rev. G. C. Milne (Hutchesontown Congrega- 
tional), and others. A brief statement having been made by 
Rev. W. EL Elliott of the history and general objects of the 
Association, Dr. Ferguson, the Chairman, introduced the 
guests. Perhaps, he said, it might appear presumption on the 
part of the three denominations to appropriate the guests to 
themselves ; and no doubt, if the gathering had been made widely 
known, no hall would have been large enough for those who 
would have crowded to it. They were all proud to recognise 
their distinguished visitors, not only as Christians, but as Inde- 
pendents. The name of Beecher was a household word, and 
he might well be called the prince of preachers, while Dr. 
Parker might be called the peer of preachers. They were par 
nobile fratrum, and their wives were both intellectual and 
spiritually-minded ladies, who knew how to use their 'pens to 
considerable purpose. He called upon the company to receive 



12 EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 

with enthusiasm the distinguished quaternion of intellectual 
and spiritual peers and peeresses. The applause which greeted 
the Chairman's remarks having subsided, Mr. Beecher rose to 
address the assembly, and was listened to with profound atten- 
tion and interest. He spoke as follows : 

A Story of Beligious Experience. 

I would say fathers and brethren, only I see 
nobody old enough to be my father. I ought, 
perhaps, to apologise for rising at all when my 
wife is present, for after the significant allusions 
that have been made, I am obliged to say that she is 
not confined to a most admirable use of the tongue, 

but that her right hand knows its cunning . 

There, now, she is treading on my feet ! " It is 
good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth," but 
my neck is so hardened to it that I scarcely think it 
is a yoke. If you had been in America, sir, and seen 
all the books that I have seen from her pen, you 
would not have stinted your literary criticism. For 
she is the mother and grandmother of housekeeping 
literature. Well, gentlemen, I am very happy to be 
with you this morning. I can hardly say what I 
am. I am not a Congregationalist, although I think 
Congregationalism to be the truest form of church 
economy that is known. I began my life in the 
Presbyterian Church ; I studied in the theological 
school presided over by my father. I was brought 
up in the controversy between the old school and 
the new school Presbyterian Church in America. 
The new school represented Calvinism as it had been 
modified by Edwabdes, Bellamy, West, Spbing, 
and other New England thinkers, and it had been 
lowered a good many degrees in its tone. The old 
school represented the Scotch, Irish, and Genevan 
theology of Calvin in its most stringent form. They 
were brought face to face in controversy ; and finally 
the great assembly that had unity before, after the 



EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 13 

manner of the Scotch, was split in two. For in 
Scotland, I think, nothing is regarded as being good 
unless it has been divided somehow. I was brought 
up on the Shorter Catechism ; and it never was 
short enough. I have lost many a dinner on Sunday 
night because I could not remember the catechism ; 
and I attribute, to a certain extent, my prejudice 
against Calvinism to the lack of those dinners. My 
father was arraigned as a heretic by the old school 
Presbytery of Cincinnati, and tried for his life. Then 
the split that took place in the General Assembly 
increased the disgust which I felt for the Calvinistic 
theme. But let me say one thing. When I read, 
in an uncontroversial spirit, the "Confession of 
Faith," the Westminster formation, I admire very 
much that is in it, the crystal clearness of many of 
its statements, the (at that time) clear statement of 
the circle of thought that had existed to that day. 
It was not until after my conversion and my attempt 
to use the truth for the conversion of other men that 
I ran against it full tilt. The son of religious people, 
hereditarily religious, the son of a woman of whom 
there are few born into this life that are her equals ; 
the son of my father, of whom, I may say, that 
while he was eloquent and among the foremost 
speakers of his day, I remember particularly that I 
never heard from him a word of uncharitableness, 
nor saw a symptom of envy or jealousy, or aught 
else but the most enthusiastic love of men, and of 
young men and young ministers ; and knowing him 
in the household, I have yet to know another 
person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings 
and so eminent in the topmost feelings of 
human nature. A child of such parents ought 
himself to be in sympathy with men on the higher 
sphere, and I was. Nevertheless, my feet were 
entangled with doubts, and I went through college, 
having become addicted to scientific research, with 



14 EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 

growing obscurity of mind ; and when I went to the 
theological seminary it was with this under-purpose, 
that if I got no further light I should turn aside to 
some other profession. It pleased God that it 
should be otherwise. Being the son of a clergyman 
who was the pastor of the second Presbyterian 
church in Cincinnati, and being a theological 
student, the young ladies of my father's charge asked 
me if I would take a Bible class. It was a great 
difficulty ; I did not know how to get out of it, and I 
did not know how sincerely I could go into it. But 
I concluded that I would follow the German method, 
where the most sceptical men in regard to inspired 
religion thought it perfectly honest to give an inter- 
pretation of the Bible as it stood without expressing 
a yea or a nay about it. I said to myself: " I can 
make a transcript of all that I find in regard to the 
life of Jesus C heist." In that work I went 
through the four Gospels until I came to the ques- 
tion of Cheist as a conversationist. That at once 
opened itself much more largely, into His famili- 
arity with His disciples, and the things that He said 
to them and to the poor and to the wicked. As I 
stood one morning in May in my little room, there 
came, as a vision from heaven, the idea that Cheist, 
representing God, loved men not conditionally on 
their repentance, but loved them anyhow ; that He 
loved them because they needed loving, and that, 
instead of receiving them when they got ready, He 
got ready to help them to receive Him. The idea 
had never before dawned upon me that the living 
consciousness of God applied to man's soul was the 
power of resurrection into a new life and exaltation 
in it. The whole heaven that had been black with 
clouds began to grow bright, and the clouds to roll 
away, and within the hour my heart leaped. I went 
through the woods with glorification, with halle- 
lujahs and songs and half-broken prayers and tears 



EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 15 

of unutterable ecstasy. That was the vision of God, 
that He was in His own nature the sinner's cure, 
not in a scheme, not in any mechanical arrange- 
ment, but from eternity and by reason of what He 
was in Himself, He was the medicine of the whole 
universe. When I came to that state, I thought, 
" Now I can preach." I said nothing about it to 
anybody, but I went through my course and took a 
little humble church where the Devil's own king- 
dom was, in the shape of enormous distilleries. It 
was said of me in a few months : " He has got 
nothing to preach about but Cheist ; " and it was 
true. Little by little the horizon grew wider and 
wider, till at last I could turn all round, north and 
south, east and west, from the very heavens to the 
earth, and there was to me nothing but Cheist. 
That has been the secret and the enthusiastic in- 
spiration of my life. I have never discussed nor 
debated the question of the Divinity of Cheist. 
I accept the phrases, and am a believer in the 
Trinity, not from understanding, but because it 
is as well to see that the infmiteness of God 
does not bear any compression of human lan- 
guage ; it is too large for words or anything in 
definition ; but still " Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit " are with me the formula with which I 
should declare the nature of God to men, and as to 
Jesus Cheist I feel: "Whom have I in heaven 
but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that I 
desire beside Thee." So armed and inspired, I went 
into the field, and seeking to be like my Master, I 
took sides with those that needed me most — with 
the dumb, with the enslaved, with the poor, with 
the needy. I did not disdain the rich, nor the wise, 
nor the strong ; but my heart went for those that 
needed some one to think, to pray for them, and to 
lead them. It was through this attempt to make 
known to men the unsearchable riches of God that 



16 EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 

I came into my first battle with theology and Cal- 
vinism. The statements in regard to the nature of 
God and His moral government seemed to me less 
and less possible. I could not preach them, and 
that feeling has never diminished. If the strong 
points of Calvinism are necessary to orthodoxy, I 
may as well say to you at once, brethren, I am not 
orthodox. But if the desire to lift up my fellow- 
men without regard to nationality or complexion, or 
conditions — if the view of God as made manifest in 
Jesus Cheist is the power by which it is to be 
done— if that is orthodoxy, I am orthodox from the 
top to the bottom. I have seen a good deal of 
warfare, I have now been over fifty years in public 
life, and forty years next autumn in my present 
charge. During that time the great Temperance 
movement has rolled a blessedness through our land ; 
during that time the great controversy on the subject 
of slavery that rent cities and denominations and 
churches had taken place, had culminated in war, 
and war in defeat of rebellion had brought upon the 
country the duty of reconstruction. It has been a 
time of most wonderful productiveness upon our 
continent. I have been in the forefront all the time, 
and the consequence is that I have had my full share 
of portrait painting, and I had the reputation of 
being the best abused person in America. But 
through good report and through evil report the 
inspiration of my life has been " He loved me." 
The inspiration of my life to-day is that a Providence 
of love governs the universe ; and my contention 
with Theology is that it is undertaking to put the 
whole of the Atlantic ocean into a jug of about 
four quarts or five, and I rebel against theology — 
that is, as the presentation of a complete circle 
of the knowledge of God and of His government in 
mankind. What I have done has been principally 
in the pulpit. I have not printed much on the 



BECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 17 

subject, but, oh ! I have preached it with the utmost 
rejoicing and relish, not from the philosophical 
standpoint, but because I wanted a religious truth 
that would be the means of converting men and 
building them up in the faith of Jesus Christ, and I 
found these things in the way, and I tore them out 
of the way. I tore them as a veil that hides the 
bride, I tore them away that I might behold the 
beauteous features of my Bride. It has not been in 
an antagonistic spirit that I have acted, but in the 
desire that the glory of God, shown in the face of 
Jesus Christ, might be made the power of God 
unto salvation. I preached from sympathy with 
men and from love to God. My life has been simply 
not in myself. My earthly life was given to me by 
two of the best folks that ever lived on earth ; I was 
not responsible for it ; I was not consulted about it 
— my second life was given to me through the grace 
of God, through the Lord Jesus Christ, and I can 
say, by the grace of God I am what I am, and have 
been what I have been, and shall be what I shall be. 
For my years are numbered. I do not regret it. 
Indeed, when I hear of one and another of my 
kindred going home, I am sometimes almost tempted 
to murmur and say: "Why they rather than I?" 
But still my health is vigorous, and it is likely that I 
shall still work for some years to come. 

A Believer in Liberty. 

Now, in regard to the relations of the gentlemen 
that are here represented this morning : I am a 
believer in liberty— liberty in the church, liberty in 
mankind. I believe in the common sense of common 
people, and, above all, in the common sense of 
Christ's called, that they are able to take care of 
anything that needs care in the local church, that 
they can do it better than any one else can do it for 

c 



18 EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 

them ; or, if they do not know how to do it, they 
can always step over to the neighbouring church and 
ask for advice— for advice is cheap in this world. 
Therefore I am an Independent or a Congrega- 
tionalism But in America there is no line of 
distinction between Presbyterian churches and Con- 
gregational. A Congregational minister goes into a 
Presbyterian pulpit, and a Presbyterian minister 
into a Congregational pulpit. About the largest Con- 
gregational church in New York is presided over by 
Dr. W. M. Taylob, who is an honest man, and says 
at once that he is a Presbyterian, but he is willing 
to administer the church economy according to the 
Congregational polity. And that has taken all over 
our land. We do not regard them as being in 
separate lines. Then as to the Baptists, the differ- 
ence between them and me is only about two feet. 
For I can baptize a man in two feet of water any 
time. I have under my platform a baptistry, and I 
have more Baptist members in my church than those 
that constitute all the Baptist churches in Brooklyn. 
Some people stumble at the idea of Communion ; I 
do not think that there is a closer Communion than 
ours. All make conditions of some sort. The only 
open communionists are those who say : "Whether 
you belong to a church or not, whether you are 
baptized or not, if you want to love Christ and 
want to follow Him, come to the table of the Lord." 
That is my position. I do not invite members of this 
church, the members of sister churches that are in 
communion with us ; I say, if there is a sinner here that 
is tired of sin, and wants to repent of sin, and wants 
Christ to help him, come — it is the Lord's table, it is 
not my church's table. My most intimate friendships 
have been among clergymen of the Baptist churches 
in America. I look outside of their number almost 
in vain for confidential, fervent friends. So that I 
feel united to the Presbyterians for having separated 



KECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 19 

myself from them, and I feel united to the Baptists 
because I walk in the same moist places ; and I feel 
of course, a Congregationalist, because I am a Con- 
gregationalist, as my fathers were before me, as all 
New England is. The best Congregationalists I 
know of in America are Baptists ; they are the most 
thorough in carrying out the local sufficiency of the 
church, the completeness of every local church for 
all its economies. I feel, then, that I am in unison 
with each and every one of you. I am struck in this 
country by the organisation in churches for the sake 
of taking care of the churches — all the institutions, 
all the officers, and all the rest mustered together. 
But here I see little churches without a bishop or a 
priest or an elder or anything else, and they are 
getting along. Children are born in them just as in 
the highest churches ; they are brought up in the 
fear and admonition of the Lord ; they live together 
in unity and work together in the service of the 
Lord ; and when a little quarrel breaks out they put 
their foot on it and put out the fire ; and they die 
and go to heaven, and I don't suppose when they get 
there they ever repent that there was not a hierarchy 
over their head. You might as well take the household 
and the family, and say that no man may marry and 
have a family until he has three or four degrees of 
organisation above him. Any sensible men and 
women — and no others ought to be married— are 
competent to take care of their domestic economy. 
And the family is the primitive pattern of the church 
itself, and is to be the ultimate form of the State 
itself, for we shall never have the kingdom of God 
on earth until the Divine principle that underlies 
and inspires the whole human family — Love — is the 
one grand spring and moving cause of national as 
well as of family life. Now, I have but little desire 
to win credit from you for my orthodoxy. If your 
theology is right, mine is very poor stuff indeed; 



20 EECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 

but if mine is right, yours is very poor. But we 
won't discuss it at all. I am not trying to build 
up theology, I am trying to build up men — 
to bring them to higher levels by the conscious 
power of Cheist working in them. I measure my 
orthodoxy by the simplicity and the purity with 
which I preach that Cheist died for men. He died 
for you, and He lives for you, and He has yet the 
power to lift you out of your sin and exalt you 
through every step and degree of sanctification till 
you stand in Zion and behold God. 

Bev. Dr. Parker followed, and in the course of his remarks 
said : The right man will soon be detected by the people, and 
will have no need of outside commendation. This is peculiarly 
— I had almost said distinctively — the case with our dear and 
honoured friend who is with us this morning. If you want to 
know how he is loved, go to Plymouth Church. If you want to 
know what the man is, ask his wife, his servants, his friends, 
who live with him seven days in the week. If I wanted Mr. 
Beecher's letter of commendation I should go to Plymouth 
Church for it. See what was done when he left his native 
shores. The whole church seemed to say : "We will go, too; 
whither thou goest we will be." " What poverty will be lefo 
behind when you leave us ! " they seemed to say ; and they 
came as far as they could, and sang a hymn ; and they went 
back weary in their hearts because the young man eloquent had 
gone away for a time. They are longing for him back again. 
Even now they are writing impertinent letters about England, 
and asking why we are detaining him so long. Even now they 
are getting impatient with their supplies. Oh, what these poor 
supplies have to bear ! I am not deficient in a certain rude kind 
of imagination, but I cannot conceive what these miserable men 
have to endure Sunday by Sunday ; I cannot imagine the con- 
sideration that would tempt me to go and say : " I am just 
come to supply Mr. Beecher's place." I would rather stand 
out upon a log ten miles off, and speak to the beggars and 
tramps passing by, and take my chance of a reputation 
among them. It is unfair to any man to ask him to 
preach for Mr. Beecher ; it is a piece of pious cruelty. I 
have been asked : " How does he preach ? " and I have replied : 
" He preaches like everything." He is fifty men. Now he is 
almost a doctrinalist ; he gathers himself up into a kind of 
patriarchal dignity as if he were about to expound a creed, and 



RECEPTION IN GLASGOW. 21 



something about him that is theological and solid and ortho- 
dox." Then suddenly he breaks into humour, and his face is 
like an April day ; tears run down his cheeks, and laughter 
comes up from his soul. Then some people — ridiculous people 
— smile in church. That is a thing not to be borne — except in 
Scotland. In Scotland you may laugh in church and enjoy 
yourselves. Scotland is a land of liberty, the creedless land— 
the unfettered land, the land of the mountain and the flood, the 
heathery land. Men can laugh on Sundays as well as Mondays 
in Scotland — at least, I hope so. I saw a man laugh — very 
nearly — yesterday morning when I was preaching in Edin- 
burgh. But I do not know whether he is living to-day. I did 
not follow his disastrous career. Dr. Guthrie once told us of 
a Scotch nurse who was nursing a baby that was crying, 
" Hush ! " said she, " it's the Sawbath ; I canna sing ye a song, 
but I'll whustle ye a paraphrase ; " and the baby, hearing that, 
never cried any more. So I have described Mr. Beechee as a 
polygonal preacher, a many-sided preacher; and so I would 
recognise him to-day, our chief and head, our leader, facile 
princeps, a man that we not only honour and admire, but love. 
Rev. A. Goodrich was the next speaker. He expressed 
his indebtedness to Mr. Beecher for his noble utterances and 
his lifelong work, and held him up as a model for imitation, in 
regard, at least, to the spirit by which he was animated. He 
was followed by Eev. Dr. Flett, who assured Mr. Beecher 
that the Westminster standards were no longer the life of 
Scottish theology, citing the remark of a friend from Dundee, 
that they were already in their coffin and would soon be 
buried. Scotland, said the Doctor, would soon be not only free, 
but the forefront of the free. This brought up Mr. Beecher 
again, with the declaration that Dr. Flett's statement was 
inexpressibly interesting and encouraging to him. He had, 
however, great respect for those who believed in Calvinism, 
because they could work with an instrument which he could 
never use. He had seen good done by the strangest instru- 
ments in the churches, and he thanked God for it. Many men 
taught what they did not believe ; but the man who believed 
like thunder would be sure to have lightning in him. 



WELCOME BY THE LONDON 
CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 



The Board of London Congregational Ministers, with their 
Wives, or other lady friends, and a few invited Guests, enter- 
tained Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at a social meeting on Tuesday, 
Sep. 28, in the Memorial Hall. Soon after four o'clock a goodly 
company had assembled in the Library, where tea and coffee 
were served. An hour having been occupied in conversazione 
fashion, an adjournment took place to the Large Hall above, 
till the tab.les were cleared. The company, probably 400 or 
upwards, then re-formed in the Library, and the meeting was 
constituted by Rev. John Nunn, Minister of Haverstock-hill 
Church, the year's Chairman of the Board, taking the Presi- 
dent's seat and giving out a hymn, which was sung. Bev., 
Josiah Viney, of Caterham, next led the meeting in prayer. 

The Chairman's Speech. 

Kev. John Nunn said : Ladies and Gentlemen — 
(should I not rather say Brethren and Sisters?), — 
This is the opening meeting of the Session of 1886 
— 1887, but it is unlike any inaugural meeting which 
I can remember or have heard of; for, first, there is 
to be no Chairman's address, which, however, in the 
present case will not grieve you. Then we are 
favoured with the presence of ladies, I believe for 
the third time in the history of the Board. On the 
first occasion a few ladies witnessed from the 
gallery the presentation of a testimonial to a former 



WELCOME BY LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 23 

secretary, the late Kev. Bobert Ashton ; on the 
second occasion, Dr. Tyler, who, with all his con- 
servatism, is a great innovator, signalised his chair- 
manship by a conversazione, when the wives and 
daughters of members were admitted to the floor of 
the House. Once again the ladies are with us, and, 
by the laws of progress, surely ought to be received 
as Associate Members of the Board. Our courage, 
however, has not been equal to this, but by way of 
advance they are with us at an inaugural meeting. 
Now the omission of the chairman's address and 
the presence of ladies are both due to a third cir- 
cumstance, viz., that we have invited as our guests 
this evening a very eminent minister and his wife — 
Kev. Henry Ward and Mrs. Beecher. They are 
bound to us by at least these ties— that they belong 
to the great English-speaking nation of the United 
States, that they come of the New England Puritan 
stock, that they follow the Congregational way, 
and that they serve as we do in the kingdom of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. It is many years since Mr. 
Beecher visited England before. Not many of our 
ministers now in London would have seen him at 
that time, and very few of our number will have 
heard him in his church at Brooklyn ; but his 
name as one of the greatest preachers of the 
age is nevertheless a household word among 
us. His sermons are widely read in this country 
for their freshness and grasp of thought, their wide 
range of subjects, their graphic, incisive style and 
poetic fancy ; for their intimate and sympathetic 
dealing with the affairs of the men of to-day, their 
bold grappling with the difficulties of belief, their 
endeavour to harmonise the knowledge of God as 
derived from His works and from His word, their 
practical aim, their passionate earnestness, their 
contagious inspiration. With so broad a survey as 
that which is embraced by Mr. Beecher's ministry, 



24 WELCOME BY THE 

it is unlikely that we should all agree in all his 
teachings. His large faith in his brethren would turn 
to incredulity if we were to profess anything of the 
kind. But at least we cannot slumber when sitting 
at his feet. His utterances are thought-provoking, 
and whether we can fully agree, or must reserve 
our judgment, or wholly dissent, his putting of things 
often compels us to reconsider, and sometimes to 
recast the forms in which we hold the truth. But, 
on the other hand, he not seldom leads us towards 
the Holy of Holies, and helps us to come into the 
unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son 
of God. When Mr. Beecher told the ministers of 
Glasgow that one morning, long ago, " there came 
■as a vision from heaven, the idea that Christ, 
representing God, loved men not conditionally on 
their repentance, out loved them, anyhow ; that He 
loved them because they needed loving, and that, 
instead of receiving them when they got ready, He 
got ready to help them to receive Him; " that he 
then thought, " Now I can preach," and that it was 
soon said of him, " He has got nothing to preach 
about but Christ," he told them that which makes 
all Christian men and ministers kin. And when he 
further said, " I am trying to build up men — to bring 
them to higher levels by the conscious power of 
Christ working in them. I measure my orthodoxy 
by the simplicity and the purity with which I preach 
that Christ died for men. He died for you and He 
lives for you, and He has yet the power to lift you 
out of your sin and exalt you through every step 
and degree of sanctification till you stand in Zion 
and behold God ; " surely He created or strengthened 
a bond, which neither lapse of time nor distance of 
place, nor secondary differences can sever. It was, 
therefore, natural that many members of the Board, 
feeling a deep interest in Mr. Beecher as a great 
pulpit orator and teacher, should desire to show him 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 25 

courtesy, respect, and honour ; and to see and hear 
him ere he returned home. Our assembly this even- 
ing is the result. It will now devolve on Dr. Allon, 
as one of the oldest members of the Board, as quite 
the oldest of our London pastors, and as a personal 
friend of Mr, Beech er, to express our greetings to 
him better than I can pretend to do. Meanwhile, 
as the Chairman of the Board, it is my pleasant 
duty, Mr. Beecher, heartily to welcome you in the 
name of all who are here present, and of others who 
cannot be present this evening, and with yourself 
to welcome also Mrs. Beecher, the valued helpmeet 
of your life and ministry for many past years. In 
the name of the brethen and sisters here allow 
me, Mr. Beecher, to shake hands with you. We 
had wished that Mrs. Beecher might have been 
with us on the platform, but her diffidence would 
not allow it ; and Mr. Sissons has presented to her, 
in our name, a bouquet — a fading memorial of our 
unfading esteem and respect. 

Address of Welcome. 

Rev. Dr. Allon then read the following address : — 
My Deab Mr. Beecher, — I have been requested 
by the officers of the Board of Congregational 
Ministers in London to address to you, in the 
name of its members, a few words of fraternal 
greeting and welcome. Until this morning I had 
purposed only a few sentences of simple and 
spontaneous recognition ; but the interest which 
your coming hither has excited has been so great 
that the character of our meeting has changed ; and 
as I speak for others as well as for myself, and with 
the restrained references of a personal address, I 
have presumed upon your good-nature permitting 
me to put upon paper the few words that I would 
speak. For the information of some here, if not 



26 WELCOME BY THE 

your own, I may say that the Board of Congre- 
gational Ministers is a purely spontaneous and 
fraternal fellowship, formed rather more than a 
century ago, and at the present time comprising 
about two-thirds of the Congregational ministers 
of London and its suburbs. From time to time 
at our monthly meetings we are glad to welcome 
as visitors ministerial brethren from different parts 
of the kingdom, from our own English colonies, 
from the continent of Europe, and especially from 
the United States of America. I do not speak 
words of flattery to you, a loyal citizen of the 
United States, and her uncompromising champion, 
but words of literal truth, in affirming that 
America is one of the best beloved and most 
proudly-vaunted of the children of this fruitful 
"mother of nations." When you were here last, 
in 1863, it was a time of confused processes. The 
relationship was one of mutual misunderstandings 
and resentments. We in England, not wholly with- 
out reason, lacked faith in the lofty aims of American 
statesmen. You, one of the most ardent and un- 
compromising of American Abolitionists, not un- 
naturally wondered that we did not discern the 
ultimate purpose of your statesmen beneath their 
political finessing. You resented, and I think some- 
what misinterpreted, our lack of faith. You felt the 
subtle atmosphere of the North, its strong religious 
and abolitionist oxygen ; we could judge it only by its 
history, its organised movements and formulated 
speech. Perhaps the convulsion was a moral neces- 
sity in the relations of England and America, as 
well as in the development of America itself. The 
calmer moods, and more restful and instinctive faith 
of the last few years sufficiently indicate that the 
perverseness, the bickerings, and the misconcep- 
tions of the preceding period were only the casual 
grit of adolescence — of that critical period when 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 27 

the parent does not gracefully recognise the 
natural term of parental authority, and when 
the child is feverishly suspicious and petulantly 
resentful. You find us to-day open-hearted and 
full-hearted, in warm appreciation of your own 
ungrudging esteem ; more united in mutual family 
affection than at any period in the history of the 
two nations. It is not our fault that the interest 
which your visit to us to-night has excited has 
changed the simple fraternal recognition that was 
intended into something like an ovation. It is not 
every American who would have evoked it. It is 
an indication of the honour which attaches to your 
name, and of the estimation in which your great 
gifts and services are held. But we may not forget 
that on your former visit even these did not suffice 
to quell resentment. True, you were then a quarter 
of a century younger, but you were not unknown to 
fame ; half your public life had been lived, and the 
place that you had taken in the esteem of all 
English-speaking peoples was very high. I well 
remember my own first realisation of your excep- 
tional gifts. It was from the lips of your dis- 
tinguished sister, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, during her 
visit to England in 1853. She had been hearing 
one of our greatest English preachers ; but instead 
of the boundless admiration that an Englishman 
naturally expected: "He is," she said "all very 
well, but oh ! for half-an-hour of my brother 
Henry ! " How largely my English ignorance and 
vanity discounted the comparative estimate it is not 
necessary for me here to say. A few years after- 
wards you honoured me with your personal ac- 
quaintance — the beginning of a friendship that has 
been one of the joys and blessings of my life. We 
honour in you, my dear brother, the great law of 
distinctive endowment, which is surely intended by 
the Creator to excite special admiration and esteem. 



28 WELCOME BY THE 

It is no disparagement of men equal in other 
qualities specially to honour those exceptionally 
endowed. In you we honour a great preacher. 
Like the poet, the preacher is born, not made. The 
manipulation of the greatest artists in human 
nature can touch only the form and circumstance 
of the man ; the mystic life, that by its subtle 
qualities of affinity, susceptibility, and intensity, 
makes one man to differ from another, is 
the distinctive gift of Him who entrusts to 
one man ten talents, to another only one. To 
you God has given the ten talents, and each 
seems to contribute its quality and force to the 
harmony and power of the entire preacher. The 
qualities of such power as the orator wields defy 
analysis ; they may be enumerated and classified — 
light and heat — but their actinic power, their inter- 
relations, which make up the one forceful life — who 
shall appraise ? The river that bears upon its bosom 
half the merchandise of the world is simply the col- 
lective force of the rivulets and distillations of half- 
a-dozen counties ; we simply recognise, admire, and 
are thankful. Only it must be said that with great 
original endowments you have combined a diligent 
culture and a practical energy that have made them 
great practical forces. No man is "a mute inglori- 
ous Milton " save through culpable lack of practical 
uses ; the greatest gifts are as though they were not 
if not practically applied. Why, the simple list of 
your preachings and lecturings in England is enough 
to take the breath away of the youngest man en- 
dowed with only ordinary muscular and intellectual 
forces. And such has been the record of your life, 
" always abounding in the work of the Lord." As 
preacher, as lecturer, as social and political reformer, 
as author, you have spared no toil, shrank from no 
conflict, compromised no conviction ; with largeness 
of grasp, catholicity of sympathy, and strenuous 



LONDON CONGEE GATIONAL BOAED. 29 

energy, you have applied whatever you believed to 
be the truth of Christ to the common things of 
daily life. The luminousness of your apprehension 
and the fearlessness of your application have won 
for you the esteem even of those who have differed 
from you the most widely. Whatever men may 
have thought about Henry "Ward Beecher — and 
they have thought and said strange things — what- 
ever their judgment of the truth of his principles or 
the wisdom of his methods, there has, I suspect, 
been no exception to the conviction that through 
and through he was one of the most manly of men 
— a man who, at any cost, must speak his thought 
and do his duty. One knows how even this may be 
but the policy and the cant of the demagogue — but 
where it is this the keen instinct of men invariably 
detects it ; only a man thoroughly true can hold his 
own in the fierce light that beats upon the pulpit for 
half a century. Of your ingenuous, straightforward, 
and uniform courage there can be no question ; your 
fearless advocacy of the slave — when to be an 
Abolitionist was to risk more than reputation 
— until slavery was engulfed in the tornado of 
fierce passions that it invoked ; your courageous 
denunciation of political corruptions and social 
immoralities ; your theological and ecclesiastical 
freedom, have won for you our high respect. 
We do not always agree with you — our tribute of 
admiration would not be much if we did — catho- 
licity demands differences as the condition of its 
charities. Perhaps on some matters the views of 
some of us may be diametrically opposed to your 
own. Nor am I so foolish as to disparage dogmatic 
opinions. " As a man thinketh in his heart, so is 
he." The theology of a man largely determines the 
strength, the sanctity, and the spirit of his religious- 
ness, and is of vital importance in a religious teacher. 
Fidelity to truth is the religion of a man's intellect, 



30 WELCOME BY THE 

to be jealously guarded irj all its forms and inspira- 
tions. In no case should charity itself induce us to 
conceal or to compromise any truth that we think to 
he such. Where we differ we will debate with you, 
withstand you to the face, so far as our own convic- 
tions of truth demand it. But there are truths and 
truths, the relative importance of which must affect 
feeling and fellowship. There are conceptions of 
the Lord Jesus Christ and His work which deter- 
mine distinction between the human and the Divine, 
which vitally affect our feelings towards the Christ 
• — determine our worship and inspire our service. 
You, my dear brother, have ever been emphatically 
faithful to the cardinal Christian truths of the in- 
carnation and the atoning death of the only begotten 
Son. No man has more fully or fervently preached 
Christ as the Divine Son of God, sent by the Father 
and consecrating Himself a sacrifice for the sins of 
the whole world. You have ever offered to Him a 
reverent and loving worship, you have preached 
Him as the light and the life of men, you have set 
forth His great love as the inspiration of all true 
religious feeling and life, and you have claimed for 
Him a grateful and passionate love which shall con- 
secrate not merely the sentiment and the things of 
life, but life itself to His service. Such being your 
preaching, it is not much that we refuse to 
permit any differences about secondary dogmas to 
lessen our confidence or qualify our love. You exer- 
cise only the liberty that we ourselves claim, and 
within the lines of common inspirations and sym- 
pathies in cardinal things our recognition is not 
merely such as we might accord to any true and 
noble-hearted man, however great his divergence — 
we welcome you as a common disciple and as an 
honoured teacher of what we alike believe to be 
the Master's Gospel. I do not know that there is 
anything very wrong in us, as your ministerial 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 31 

brethren, looking with a kind of pious covet- 
ing upon the great gifts that as a preacher 
you have for fifty years, and without dimness 
of spiritual eye or abatement of oratorical strength, 
continuously exercised. I wish I could preach as 
you can. I wish I had such a record behind me. I 
do not murmur at Christ's distribution of gifts to 
His servants ; I would not if I could dispossess you. 
We glorify God in you, and without discontent or 
envy offer you our congratulations and love ; but I 
wish we were more of us like you. We admire your 
strong and zealous assertion of the right and duty to 
think for yourself ; the abounding vitality and prac- 
tical energy with which you have inspired your 
convictions ; the catholicity of your spiritual appre- 
hension and the luminousness of your expositions ; 
the directness and solicitude of your practical re- 
ligious aim; your large conceptions of the sphere 
of God's revealed truth and your masterful grasp of 
its forces. And if a reference to lower things be 
lawful, we have admired also the high excellences of 
the orator's art, the consummate way in which the 
logic, and even metaphysic, of thought is combined 
with rhetoric of speech and with overflowing sym- 
pathy of heart, strong argument with playful fancy, 
deep earnestness with suggestive humour, pre- 
meditated thought with spontaneous exposition — a 
keen eye for ever dawning lights on the Eastern 
horizon of truth with a restful and fruitful faith in 
the lights that have brightened to meridian certainty 
and splendour. But I may not permit the tempta- 
tion of such criticisms to violate the delicacy of 
personal address. We welcome you here, my 
brother, with sincere, and full, and thankful hearts. 
As common servants of the one Divine Master we 
" esteem you very highly in love for your works' 
sake." For your large heart of brotherly love, too, 
we esteem you. The expression of our affection 



32 WELCOME BY THE 

finds only simple forms ; the affection of many hearts 
towards you finds no formal expression at all ; they 
silently greet you and will invisibly follow you. It 
is one of the meetings of life that may not recur — 
some of us, like yourself, have the years of life 
behind us. Like ships at sea we pass and salute 
each other and see each other no more. There is 
a meeting where no farewells are spoken — a place 
where they who gather " go out no more for ever, but 
their works do follow them ; " and there the hum- 
blest services will be recognised with the large and 
gracious optimism of Divine love. His grace keep- 
ing us faithful to the end, we shall meet in the 
Father's house, and it may be that the meeting of 
to-night will not even there be wholly forgotten. 

Mr. Beecher's Besponse. 

Me. Beechee, who, on rising, was received with 
prolonged acclamation, said : My life has been a 
long and public life already, and the experiences of 
that life, in the wilderness, in populous cities, at 
home and abroad, have been many and critical, and 
memorable ; but I must say that your presence to- 
night, your cordiality, your recognition, and the 
words into which it has been poured, constitute by 
all odds the most memorable experience of my 
whole life. It is not a matter, to-night, of vanity 
on my part. Not before the judgment seat shall I 
feel more solemn than I feel in the presence of so 
many men consecrated to the work of Chiist and 
the salvation of men ; and your testimony that 
through good report and bad report, under all pres- 
sures and difficulties, on the whole I have shown to 
you such Christian fidelity and such simple manli- 
ness — that testimony I shall leave as a legacy to 
my children. I dare not think of myself what you 
have been kind enough to express. I only know 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 33 

this — and I say it as in the conscious presence of 
Christ, my Lord and my all — that by the grace 
given to me of my God and my mother I have 
endeavoured during my long life most disinterestedly 
and most earnestly to do the things that I believed 
would please Christ in the salvation of men. I have 
had no ambitions, I have sought no laurels, I have 
deliberately rejected many things that would have 
been consonant to my taste. It would have been 
for me a great delight to be a scholar ; I should 
have relished exceedingly to have perfected my 
thought in the study, and to have given it such 
qualities as that it should stand as classics stand. 
But when the work was pressed upon me, and my 
relations to my own country and to mankind be- 
came urgent, I remember, as if it were but yester- 
day, when I laid my literary ambition and my 
scholarly desires upon the altar, and said, " If I can 
do more for my Master and for men by my style of 
thinking and working, I am willing to work in a 
second-rate way ; I am willing to leave writing 
behind my back ; I am willing not to carve statues 
of beauty, but simply to do the things that would 
please God in the salvation of men." I have had 
every experience almost that is possible to men : I 
have been sick and I have been well ; I have been 
liked and I have not been liked ; I have been in the 
wilderness among the poor and the emigrant, I 
have drifted into the cities where the great and 
refined are ; I have known what poverty was, and 
I have known what it was to have almost enough. 
But these things have all been incidental. And 
now to begin at the beginning, for this must be 
biographical; I dismiss my modesty, and I go at 
myself now. My mother, born in the Episcopal 
Church, and a devout adherent to that form of faith 
and government, married my father. She was a 
sensible woman, evinced not only by that, but by 



34 WELCOME BY THE 

the fact that she united herself to the Congrega- 
tional Church in Lichfield, Connecticut, and she 
was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts ; a 
woman not demonstrative, with a profound philo- 
sophical nature, and of wonderful depth of affection, 
but with a serenity that was simply charming. 
While my father was in the early religious expe- 
rience under Calvinistic teaching, debating and swell- 
ing and floating here and there, and tormenting 
himself, she threw the oil of faith and trust on the 
waters, and they were quieted, for she trusted in 
God. Now, when I was born, I was the fourth,, 
fifth, sixth, or seventh child — somewhere there- 
abouts. There were six sons, I know, in all, and 
not one of them escaped from the pulpit. My 
mother dedicated me to the work of the foreign 
missionary ; she laid her hands upon me, wept over 
me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among 
the heathen, and I have been doing it all my life 
long, for it so happens one does not need to go far 
from his own country to find his audience before 
him. From here I received my love of the beauti- 
ful, my poetic temperament, which I beg you to 
take notice is culpable, for a good deal of that heresy 
to which allusion has been made. From here also I 
received simplicity and childlike faith in God. I went 
through all the colic and anguish of hyper-Calvinism 
while I was yet quite young. Happily my constitu- 
tion was strong — I regard the old hyper-Calvinistic 
system as the making of as strong men as are ever 
met on the face of this earth ; but I think it kills 
five hundred where it makes one. This is a meet- 
ing of perfect frankness. When I was a boy, eight 
years old and upward, I knew as much about 
decrees, fore-ordination, election, reprobation, as 
you do now ; I used to be under the murky atmo- 
sphere, and I said to myself, " Oh, if I could only 
repent, then I should have a Saviour." As years 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 35 

went on, and I entered my collegiate course, I 
remember with shame and mortification the expe- 
riences through which I went ; the pleadings for 
mercy, the longings for some token of acceptance, 
and the prayers that became ritualistic from their 
repetition, that I might have that that was hanging 
over my head and waiting for me to take, and I did 
not know how — I did not know how ! Then at 
last it pleased God to reveal to me His infinite 
universal love to mankind, and I beheld Him as a 
helper, as the soul's midwife, as the soul's physician, 
and I felt because I was weak I could come to 
Him, because I did not know how, and if I did 
know I had not the strength, to do the things that 
were right — that was the invitation that He gave to 
me out of my conscious weakness and want. I will 
not repeat the scene of that morning when light 
broke fairly on my mind ; how one might have 
thought that I was a lunatic escaped from confine- 
ment, how I ran up and down through the primaeval 
forest of Ohio, snouting, "Glory, glory!" some- 
times in loud tones, and at other times whispered 
in an ecstasy of joy and surprise : all the old 
troubles gone, and, light breaking in on my mind, I 
cried, " I have found my God ! I have found my 
God ! " Prom that hour I consecrated myself to 
the work of the ministry. I had been studying 
theology. You would not suspect it, but I know a 
good deal of theology. Well, I was called to work 
in Ohio and in Indiana, and very soon I found 
that my work was very largely a missionary work, 
for the States were then young — it was fifty years 
ago — and they were very largely peopled by 
emigrants, men that had come without fortune to 
make fortune. I went through the woods and 
through camp-meetings and over prairies ; every- 
where my vacations were all missionary tours, 
preaching Christ for the hope of salvation. I am 



36 WELCOME BY THE 

not saying this to show you how I came to the 
knowledge of Christ, hut to show you how I came 
to the habit and forms of my ministry. I tried 
everything on to folks. I had an active mind and a 
good deal of reading, and was brought up in the 
school of dispute where were my father and Dr. 
Tyler, and Dr. Taylor, and Dr. Porter, and Dr. 
Woods, and other men that have repented of their 
orthodoxy long ago in heaven. I mention this to 
show how it was that I took on the particular forms 
which have maintained themselves measurably 
through my life. There are a great many of you 
that think that I do not believe in theology. There 
was a sort of veiled allusion to that in the address — 
not very veiled, methinks. My ministry began in 
the West, as I have said. I was fresh from the con- 
troversies of New England. I went to Cincinnati 
for the study of theology with Dr. Wilson, as stiff a 
man and as orthodox as Calvin himself, and as 
pugnacious as ten Calvins rolled into one. He 
arraigned my father for heterodoxy ; he had to go 
through the trial of the Presbytery, and the Synod 
of the General Assembly kicked it all out. You 
need not ask me whether I was disgusted or not, 
whether I saw all the wild work of warring, pestilent 
theology, and all that strife, with acquiescence or 
with sympathy. Then, in connection with that, the 
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church broke 
in two ; one half was new school and the other half 
was old school. The new school Presbyterianism 
in America means Calvinism leavened by New 
England thought ; the old school means Calvinism 
with Scotch and Irish thought leavening, and 
the Middle States and the Western were largely 
populated by the schoolmasters and the preachers 
that came from Scotland and Ireland. I need not 
say that they brought their peculiarities with them. 
Now, seeing this fight, degenerating oftentimes into 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 37 

the most scandalous enmities, I turned away in ab- 
solute disgust from all these things and said, "My 
business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear 
upon them those views that are my comfort, that are 
the bread of life to me," and I went out amongst 
them almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary 
church institutions and agencies, knowing nothing 
but " Christ, and Him crucified," the sufferer for 
mankind. Did not the men round me need such a 
Saviour ? Was there ever such a field as I found ? 
Every sympathy of my being was continually soli- 
cited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the 
aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness 
of the men among whom I was, and I was trying 
every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to 
men, and as I went on. and more and more tried to 
preach Christ, the clouds broke away, and I began to 
have a distinct system in my own mind. For I had 
been early in alliance with scientific pursuits. I had!, 
early been a phrenologist, and I am still — all that is 
left of it in me ; and I had followed all the way up 
with a profound conviction that God had two reve- 
lations in this world, one of the book and the other 
of the rock, and I meant to read them both — the 
Old Testament and the New. And, not to shut out 
the light, I had to do this in such a sense as to be 
just to myself, though I knew it brought doubt and 
often suspicion upon me among my brethren ; but I 
had not time to attend to that. When they said to 
me, " You are not orthodox," I replied, " Very well, 
be it so ; I am out on another business ; I under- 
stand that call that has been sounding down through 
two thousand years, and is sounding yet, ' Follow 
Me, and I will make you fishers of men.' " I dedi- 
cated myself not to be a fisher of ideas, nor of 
books, nor of sermons, but a fisher of men, and in 
this work I very soon came to this point, in 
which I felt dissatisfied with the views of God that 



38 WELCOME BY THE 

had been before given. I felt dissatisfied with that 
whole realm of theology which I now call the 
machinery of religion, which has in it some truth, 
and I would it had more. But I came to have this 
feeling, that it stood in the way of sinful men. I 
found men in distress, in peril of soul, on account of 
views which I did not believe were true, or if true, 
not in any such proportion. If you want to know 
why I have been fierce against theology, that is it ; 
because I thought with Mary, and I said time and 
again, " They have taken away my Lord, and I 
know not where they have laid Him." It seemed to 
me that men could not believe in such a God as I 
heard preached about, that men could not believe 
such a schedule of Truth as I had seen crystallised 
and promoted among men. I do not care the turn 
of my hand about a man's philosophy; I do not 
care about one system or another ; any system that 
will bring a man from darkness to faith and love I 
will tolerate ; and any system that lets down the 
curtain between God and men, whether it is canoni- 
cal priest, or church service, or church methods, 
whether it is the philosophical or the theological — 
anythhig that blurs the presence of God, anything 
that makes the heavens black and the heart hope- 
less, I will fight it to the death. Well, a little later 
on — this, perhaps, will cover the first twenty years 
of my ministry — before I found the water deep 
enough for me to swim in, I came insensibly into 
connection with public questions ; I was sucked 
into the political controversies and the moral reforma- 
tions of the age ; and just at that time that question 
was coming up which involved every principle of 
rectitude, of morality, of humanity, and of religion. 
My father was too old; the controversy came on 
when he was failing ; he was cautious in his way ; 
he was afraid that his son Henry would get himself 
into difficulties. But I took no counsel with men. 



LONDON CONGEEGATIONAL BOAED. 39 

When I came to Brooklyn some dear men, who are 
now at rest, said, with the "best intention, "You 
have a blessed chance, and you can come to very good 
influence if you do not throw yourself away; " and 
they warned me not to preach on slavery and on 
some other topics that at that time were up iu the 
public mind. I do not know what it is in me — 
whether it is my father or my mother, or both of 
them — but the moment you tell me that a thing that 
ought to be done is unpopular, I am right there 
every time. I fed on the privilege of making men 
hear things that they did not want to hear, because 
I was a public speaker. I gloried in my gifts, not 
because they brought praise, but because they 
brought the other thing continually. But men would 
come and would hear, and I rejoiced in it, and, as 
my Master knows, I laid all these tributes and all 
the victories that they brought at the feet of Him 
who is the liberator of the world. Jesus knows that 
for His sake I smote with the sword and with the 
spear, not because I loved controversy, but because 
I loved truth and humanity ; and because I saw 
weak men flinch, and because I saw base men 
truckle and bargain, because I saw that the cause of 
Christ was likely to suffer, I fought, and I will fight 
to the end. With this brief analysis of the lines of 
development, allow me to say a word in regard more 
especially to my theological views. And first let me 
say that I think I am as orthodox a man as there is 
in the world. Well, what are the tests of ortho- 
doxy ? Man universally is a sinner ; man univer- 
sally needs to be born again ; there is in the nature 
of God that power and influence that can convert a 
man and redeem him from his animal life ; and it is 
possible for man so to bring to bear this divine in- 
fluence in the ministration of the Gospel as that 
men shall be awakened and convicted, and converted 
and built up in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is 



40 WELCOME BY THE 

my orthodoxy. But how about the Trinity ? I do 
not understand it, but I accept it. If anybody 
else understands it I have not met him yet ; but 
it seems to me that that is the easiest way of 
rendering the different testimonies or words of 
truth in the New Testament ; neither do I see 
any philosophical objection to it at all, and I accept 
it without questioning. What about original sin? 
There has been so much actual transgression that I 
have not had time to go back on to that. On 
what grounds may a man hope ? On the atonement 
of Christ? Yes, if you want to interpose that word 
atonement on that ground unquestionably I am 
accustomed to say Christ saves men. But how ? 
That is his look out, not mine. I think that because 
the nature of God is sanative God is love. "If ye 
being evil know how to give good gifts to your 
children, how much more shall your Father which 
is in heaven give good gifts to them which ask 
Him ? " If you choose to fix it in this way, and say 
that Christ saw it possible to do so and thus and so 
and thus, and that was the atonement He made, and 
if you take any comfort in it I shall not quarrel with 
you. But it is enough for me to know this, that 
Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has proclaimed, to 
whomsoever will, health, life, new life — " born 
again;" He has offered these, and therefore I no 
more want to question how He does it than a sick 
man questions the doctor before he takes a pill. If 
he says, " Doctor, what is in it ? " the doctor says, 
" Take it. and you will find out what is in it." If 
men think I am heterodox because I do not believe 
this, that, and the other explanation of the atone- 
ment of Jesus Christ, it is enough for me to say I 
believe in Christ, and I believe Christ is atonement. 
Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the 
Divinity of Christ, I do not believe in anything 
else. Let a man stand and look at the sun, then 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 41 

ask him what he sees besides. Nothing ; it blinds 
him. There is nothing else to me when I am 
thinking of God ; it fills the whole sphere, the 
heaven of heavens and the whole earth and all 
time ; and out of that boundlessness of love and 
that infiniteness of Divine faculty and capacity, 
it seems to me that He is, to my thought, 
what summer is when I see it marching on 
after the cold winter is over. I know where the 
light comes from, and where the warmth comes 
from. When I see anything going on for good and 
for the staying of evil, I know it is the Sun of 
Eighteousness, and the Name to me is Jesus — every 
time Jesus. For Him I live, for Him I love, for 
Him I labour, for Him I rejoice in my remaining 
strength, for Him I thank God that I have yet so 
much in me that can spend and be spent for the 
only one great cause which should lift itself above 
every other cause in this whole world. To preach 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to have Christ so melted 
and dissolved in you that when you preach your 
own self you preach Him as Paul did, to have every 
part of you living and luminous with Christ, and 
then to make use of everything that is in you, your 
analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your 
imagination, your mirthfulness, your humour, your 
indignation, your wrath, to take everything that is 
in you all steeped in Jesus Christ, and to throw 
yourself with all your power upon a congregation — 
that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel. 
A good many folks have laughed at the idea of my 
being a fit preacher because I laughed, and because 
I made somebody else laugh. I never went out of 
my way to do it in my life ; but if some sudden 
turn of a sentence, like the crack of a whip, sets 
men off, I do not think any the worse of it for that 
— not a bit. I have felt that man should consecrate 
every gift that he has got in him that has any rela- 



4% WELCOME BY THE 

tion to the persuasion of men, and to the melting 
of men — that he should put them all on the altar, 
kindle them all, and let them burn for Christ's sake. 
I have never sought singularity, and I have never 
avoided singularity. When they wanted some other 
sort of teaching I have always said, " Get it. If 
you want my kind, here I am ready to serve you ; 
if you do not, serve yourself better." Now there is 
one more thing that I want to say something about, 
aside from these central influential fountain doc- 
trines — that is, Church Economy, Ordination, and 
Ordinance. I regard it as true that there is laid down 
in the New Testament no form of church government 
whatever nor of church ordinance — none. I hold that 
in the earliest age, while the Apostles were alive, 
they substantially conformed ; they borrowed and 
brought into service the synagogical worship and 
used that ; the idea of another church had not come 
into their minds. You recollect that when Paul 
went to Jerusalem after he had been preaching for 
twenty years, James took him aside, and said, 
" What is this we hear ? the brethren hear that you 
have abandoned Moses, and that you do not believe 
in him. I will tell you what to do," says James the 
Venerable, " there are going to be some men clear 
themselves of their views in the assembly to-day, do 
you go up and clear yourself, that the brethren may 
know that these things that they have heard are not 
true." Paul had been preaching for twenty years 
that Christ was the only hope and foundation, and 
that Moses was a mere shadow, and a forerunner 
and preparation for Christ. He went into the 
Temple ; but do you suppose he had a church 
catechism and all his foundations laid ? He would 
have lied if he had spoken in that way at that time. 
Paul did not see the outlines of the church, they 
grew, they developed out of the nature of things. 
And so I say in regard to all church worship, that 



LONDON CONOBEGATIONAL BOAED. 43 

Is the best form of church economy that in the long 
run helps men to be the best Christians. In regard 
to ordinance I stand very nearly where the Quakers 
do, except this ; they think that because they are 
not divinely commanded they are not necessary. I 
think they are most useful. Common schools are 
not divinely ordered, Sunday-schools are not 
divinely ordered; but would you dispense with 
them ? Is there no law and reason except that of 
the letter? Whatever thing is found when applied 
to human nature to do good, that is God's 
ordinance. If there are any men that worship 
God through the Eoman Catholic Church — and 
there are — I S3bj this in regard to them : " I 
cannot, but you can; God bless you!" In that 
great venerable church there is Gospel enough to 
save any man, no man need perish for want of light 
and truth in that system ; and yet what an economy 
it is, what an organisation, what burdens, and how 
many lurking mischiefs that temptation will bring 
out ! I could never be a Roman Catholic, but I 
could be a Christian in a Roman Catholic Church ; 
I could serve God there. I believe in the Episco- 
pacy — for those that want it. Let my tongue forget 
its cunning if I ever speak a word adverse to that 
Church that brooded my mother, and now broods 
some of the nearest blood kindred I have on earth. 
It is a man's own fault if he do not find salvation in 
the teachings and worship of the great Episcopal 
body of the world. "Well, I can find no charm in 
the Presbyterian government. I was for ten years 
a member of the Presbyterian Church, for I swore 
to the Confession of Faith ; but at that time my 
beard had not grown. The rest of the Book of 
Worship has great wisdom in it, and, rather than not 
have any brotherhood, I would be a Presbyterian 
again if they would not oblige me to swear to the 
Confession of Faith. On the other hand, my birth- 



44 WELCOME BY THE 

right is in the Congregational church. I was born 
in it, it exactly agreed with my temperament and 
with my ideas ; and it does yet, for although it is in 
many respects slow moulded, although in many 
respects it has not the fascinations in its worship 
that belong to the high Ecclesiastical organisations, 
though it makes less for the eye and less for the ear, 
and more for the reason and the emotions, though it 
has therefore slender advantages, it has this : that it 
does not take men because they are weak, and 
crutch them up upon its worship, and then just 
leave them as weak after forty years as they were 
when it found them. A part of its very idea is so to 
meet the weakness of men as that they shall grow 
stronger ; to preach the truth, and then wait till 
they are able to seize that truth and live by it. 
It works slowly, but I tell you that when it has 
finished its work it makes men in the community ; 
and I speak both of the Congregationalists that are 
called Baptists, and those that are called Congrega- 
tionalists ; they are one and the same, and ought 
to be hand in hand with each other, in perfect 
sympathy. Under my platform in Brooklyn I have 
a baptistery, and if anybody's son or daughter 
brought up in Baptist ideas wants to be immersed, 
you won't catch me reasoning with them ; I baptize 
them. So it is that I immerse, I sprinkle, and I 
have, in some instances, poured, and I never saw 
there was any difference in the Christianity that was 
made. They have all, for that matter, come out so 
that I should not know which was immersed or 
which was sprinkled. I believe there ought to be 
more unity among Congregationalists of every kind. 
What then? Would you merge our conscientious 
views of immersion ? No, I would not merge them. 
Why cannot you immerse and then let it alone ? 
Why cannot you let us sprinkle and let us alone ? 
The unity of Christians does not depend upon 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 45 

similarity of ordinance or methods of worship. It 
is a heart business. I do not believe the millennium 
will see one sect, one denomination, any more than 
the perfection of civilisation will see only one great 
phalanstery, one family. The man on this side of 
the street keeps house in one way, and the man 
over on the other side keeps house in another. 
They do not quarrel ; each lets the other alone. So 
I hold about churches. The unity of the church 
is to be the unity of the hearts of men — spiritual 
unity in the love of Christ and in the love of each 
other. Do not, then, meddle with the details of the 
way in which different persons choose to conduct 
their service. Let them alone ; behave at least as 
decently in the church of Christ as you would do 
in your neighbourhood and in each other's families. 
I do not know why they should not concurrently 
work in all the great causes of God among mankind. 
I am not, therefore, to teach Congregationalism, I am 
not to teach the Baptist doctrine, I am not to teach 
Presbyterianism ; I am to preach "Oh, ye that are 
lost by reason of your sins, Jesus Christ has found 
a ransom for you ; come, come, and ye shall live." 
That is my message, and in that I have enthusiasm. 
It is not to build up one church, or another church, 
or to cry down one church or another. Brethren, 
we have been trying conscience for a great while : 
what have we got by it ? About one hundred and 
fifty denominations. There is nothing so unmanage- 
able as a conceited conscience. Now, suppose we 
should try another thing ; suppose we should try 
love a little while ; suppose we should try sympathy, 
trust, fellowship, brotherhood, without inquisitorial 
power ; suppose we should let men's theologies take 
care of themselves, and bring this test to bear upon 
them — what is the fruit, of their personal living, 
and what is the fruit of their personal teaching? 
" By their fruits shall ye know them," did not 



46 WELCOME BY THE 

exhaust itself in personal thought alone. It is & 
good test for denomination alisni, and whenever I 
find a denomination that puts emphasis upon holi- 
ness, where there is no envy, nor detraction, nor 
backbiting, nor suspicion, nor holding each man to 
philosophical schedules, when I find a denomination 
in which they are full of love and gentleness and 
kindness, I am going to join that denomination. 
But I do not expect to change for some time. God 
forbid that I should set myself forth for that which 
I am not — the founder of a sect. I think anybody 
would find a good deal of trouble to get together 
enough of definite material that is consecutive and 
logical to make a sect out of my sermons. That is 
not what I have been after ; it is not what I am 
going to try for to the end of my life. My work 
before me is just what my work has been hitherto — 
the preaching of such aspects and attributes of God 
as shall win men to love and to trust and to 
obedience. My life is for the most part spent. I am 
warned every year, not by any apparent decadence 
of health, but by counting ; I know that it cannot 
be for me to be active for many more years ; but so 
long as life remains and strength, so long as men 
want my ministration, I shall minister in the name 
of the Lord Jesus Christ to the wants and the souls 
of my fellow-men. And as my years grow more I 
want to bear a testimony. I suppose I have had as 
many opportunities as any man here, or any living 
man, of what are called honours and influence and 
wealth. The doors have been opened, the golden 
doors, for years. I want to bear witness that the 
humblest labour which a minister of God can do for 
a soul for Christ's sake is grander and nobler than 
all learning, than all influence and power, than all 
riches. And knowing as much as I do of society, I 
have this declaration to make — that if I were called 
to live my life over again and I were to have a 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 47 

chance of the vocations which men seek, I would 
again choose, and with an impetus arising from the 
experience of this long life, the ministry of the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ, for honour, for cleanliness, 
for work that never ends, having the promise of the 
life that now is, as well as of that which is to come. 
I would choose the preaching of the Gospel — to 
them that perish foolishness, to them that believe 
and accept it life everlasting. Brethren, I want to 
pray with you ; will you let me join with you in 
prayer : — 

Dear Lord, Thou hast been very gracious to us, 
and through many years Thou hast brought us at 
last to these latter days. Thou hast brought us 
to-day with these Thy beloved servants to speak of 
the things that pertain to Thee and Thy kingdom. 
We thank Thee for their good and kind thoughts of 
us ; we thank Thee for their confidence and their trust. 
But, Lord Jesus Christ, what are we compared 
with Thee? Thy name is the one name, Thy ser- 
vice is the one service. Spirit of Love, fill us with 
Thine own presence, forgive our weaknesses, forgive 
our lives that have been so imperfect that we have 
not known how to preach as well as we should; 
forgive us that we have cultivated the deeper 
emotions of the soul so little or so imperfectly as 
that they do not come forth as the very sound of the 
Gospel itself. But Thou hast forgiven it again and 
art always forgiving. We are poor, we are sinful, 
we are staggering under imperfections ; we know 
that ourselves, but every day we lay our head upon 
Thy bosom. Jesus, there is nothing but Thee, 
Thou art our hope, our love. Thy patience is the 
author of all our patience, Thy power is the author 
of all our power ; and now to-day we bring all that 
is good in us and say, "Not unto us, not unto us, 
but unto Thy name." Dear Lord, pour Thyself 
out upon Thy servants here, and upon Thy hand- 



48 WELCOME BY THE 

maidens, and grant that the homes of these Thy 
servants may be as the very temples of God. Purge 
away all their ambition if this be their weakness ; 
purge away all their combativeness if this has been 
the thing with which they have striven. Envyings 
and jealousies — Lord, we would not have Thee 
served by such imperfect things. Give to Thy 
servants something of the clarity of vision, some- 
thing of the purity and sweetness of Thine own 
nature, and may they feel more and more that it is 
an honour to be permitted to preach Christ at all. 
And if there are any that are in trials, any that are 
pinched in means, if there be any that feel their 
feebleness, that they are overshadowed by men 
round about them, Lord give them the heroic 
spirit that they may be willing to bear contumely, 
that they may be willing to bear weakness, that 
they may be able to say with Thy servant of old, 
" I rejoice in my necessities." Give to them a 
nearer view of heaven. How soon our life flies 
away ! How near we are to the great land ! Our 
fathers are there, our mothers, our children are 
there ; but Thou chiefly, Jesus. We are coming, 
and are glad as the years go by. We would not die, 
and yet we are in a strait, often betwixt two, having 
a desire to depart and be with Jesus, though it be 
perhaps needful for Thy work and Thy cause that 
we abide yet longer. Now let Thy Spirit be poured 
in pentecostal measure upon Thy dear servants. 
Cleanse them from their sins ; purify them inwardly 
and outwardly. Give them great fruit of their 
labour. May they never be discouraged, and may 
they be a voice everywhere saying to men, " This is 
the way, walk ye in it," and may they walk in it 
themselves. Now to the God of our father, our 
mother, and the God of our little children, oh, thou 
God that art our God, we praise Thee, we love Thee, 
we long for Thee. When shall we appear in Sion 



LONDON CONGREGATIONAL BOARD. 49 

before G-od? When we coma, then we will cry with 
all Thy servants, " Glory be to Him who shed His 
blood for us, and by whom we have been cleansed." 
And for ever and for ever we will praise the Father, 
the Son, and the Spirit. Amen. 

Speeches on Vote of Thanks. 

Eev. Professor Bedford : Brethren and Sisters, — 
I could have wished that we had broken through 
our etiquette on such an occasion as this, and that 
instead of having any formal vote of thanks we had 
just carried away with us from this meeting the 
solemn, touching, and deeply-affecting impression of 
that lovely prayer that has just been offered up at 
the throne of grace. I think it would have been far 
better than prolonging the meeting now, especially 
as we have already gone beyond the time at which 
we generally close our meetings ; but at the same 
time I must regard myself, I suppose, as a martyr to 
official etiquette. As I hold the position of the Vice- 
President of the Board it devolves upon me to be the 
mouth-piece for this meeting, and to express our 
sense of gratitude to our dear brother and friend, 
Mr. Beecher, that he has come amongst us this 
evening and given us the opportunity of listening to 
his words. I remember that great statesman, whom 
we yet hope to see once more at the head of our 
country, saying to one of my brethren that it was, 
always a great delight to him to come amongst 
Nonconformist ministers — that it was like breathing 
the air of a mountain country, there was something 
so bracing in their freedom and independency of 
thought, they did not speak to one another with 
bated breath, they spoke to one another as men. 
So w r e must feel, I am sure, that our brother, Mr. 
Beecher, has brought with him the freshness of 
thought and the energy of feeling which charac- 



50 WELCOME BY THE 

terises our cousins on the other side of the water ; 
and, though I know he is no friend to the sea, I 
cannot help thinking he has brought some of the 
sea-breezes with him in his visit to this country. 
He has been thrilling in an electrical kind of way 
through the land from north to south, and, indeed, 
one might say with regard to some of his addresses 
that they have been so novel, so startling, and so 
powerful in character that some of our old stagers, I 
can fancy, feel almost like the people in Charleston ; 
they do not know what is going to tumble down 
next ; they feel in continual terror lest some of these 
extraordinary statements should shake down " the 
things that remain." But I think it has been a 
very great privilege to all of us to be here to-night 
and to listen to this deeply interesting autobio- 
graphy, as we may describe it. It has been most 
touching to find that our dear friend, like so many 
other of the distinguished men and women of our 
time, has begun with Evangelical truth. That is to 
me, I must say, a fact that is full of significance. All 
that Mr. Beecher has that is good in him, he tells us 
plainly to-night, he got at the feet of the Lord Jesus 
Christ ; and his words have been full of the very 
spirit of the Saviour. He has come to us as the 
Apostle John, to breathe words of universal charity ; 
he has set before us such a scheme of the Chris- 
tian Church, founded upon a catholic basis, as has 
thrilled all our hearts. We have all felt we have 
been one with him, entirely one with him in all 
that he has said to-night. I think we ought to 
be extremely thankful that we have had the oppor- 
tunity of listening to the statements of doctrine, 
of creed, and church government which we have 
heard to-night, because it would be quite possible, 
I suppose, for some of the rather old stagers who 
have been brought up in stiff and narrow ortho- 
doxy, listening to the lectures and sermons of our 



LONDON CONGEE GATIONAL BOAED. 51 

brother, to say that he was not sound in faith ; 
but it would have been impossible for them to listen 
to his autobiographical statement to-night and to 
doubt that he is faithful to Jesus, that the very- 
spirit of the Lord has been actuating him through 
all his ministry, and that now, in his last days, 
he is more faithful even than ever he was, more 
devoted to the simple truth as it is in Jesus. As 
a theological professor I teach that we do not 
believe in the works of supererogation, and it would 
certainly be such a work for me to attempt to 
detain this meeting and to enlarge upon any topics 
that have been brought before us ; but we all feel 
our debt of gratitude. I therefore simply ask you 
this evening to join in expressing our thanks to Mr. 
Beecher for his kindness in coming amongst us, and 
for the thrilling and deeply interesting address he has 
given us, and to wish him health and happiness. 

Eev. J. G. Rog-ees : Mr. Chairman and Christian 
friends, — I am here simply at this moment because 
I have been thrilled to my heart's core by the words 
to which I have listened. I ought to have been 
away long since. I stayed on to the end, and then 
thought I could certainly get away, but as I was 
going I felt that I had done wrong in refusing to 
speak ; therefore I must say what is in my soul in 
relation to the speech to which we have listened. I 
am not going to talk to-night about the claims of 
Mr. Beecher or Mr. anybody else to orthodoxy ; we 
have discussed that point, I think, quite long 
enough. I have arrived at this conclusion — that 
there is no doctrine worth anything, no matter 
whether it is called orthodox or heterodox, until it 
is thoroughly fused and melted by love ; and when 
a doctrine has been fused by love it is amazing how 
soon it loses all dross of heresy that may belong to 
it and comes out pure gold fit for the Master's 
using. After all, if we can get to understand that 



52 WELCOME BY THE 

point, that it is not so much the particular shade 
of opinion that a man sets forth, but the soul he 
breathes into the opinion which he utters that 
makes the difference, we shall come to have fewer 
of those hard thoughts which, men entertain in 
relation to one another, simply because they differ 
in their views. There is one thing, I think, that 
Mr. Beecher has shown us; he has helped us to 
understand out of what a school he came. We 
have known something of the old Calvinism in this 
country ; I begin to doubt whether we have known 
quite as much of it as Mr. Beecher has known 
in his. I remember troubling my good father, who 
was a most excellent and godly minister of the 
Gospel, when I told him that I could not honestly 
say I believed I was to. suffer for Adam's sin. He 
was greatly distressed, and did not understand 
whither I was going. That, I suppose, has been 
more or less the experience of most of us. But I 
think if our fathers could see where we stand to- 
day, they would see that the church has gained 
incalculably, immeasurably, by learning to know 
that it is not God who is waiting for us to seek 
after Him, but in His love He is continually seek- 
ing after us, and that is very much the difference, 
as it seems to me, between the old theology and the 
new. I do not want to discuss these differences 
to-night ; I want rather to say what is in my 
heart in relation to the speech to which we have 
listened, and still more to the devout, earnest, 
loving prayer by which it was succeeded. I go 
away devoutly thankful to God that I have been 
permitted to catch the inspiration, the fervour, the 
enthusiasm, the spiritual zeal that has been 
breathed into us all to-night. I pray that our 
brother may go back, feeling that he is laden with 
the convictions and followed by the prayers of us 
all at home, and that we shall all be nobler and 



LONDON CONGEE GATIONAL BOARD. 53 

better men for these words o£ cheer and this hour 
of sympathy. 

Rev. Dr. Parker, responding to a general call, 
said : I feel I shall not be lowering the tone of the 
proceedings which are now closing if I venture to 
say that the address of welcome which was given to 
Mr. Beecher expressed, with highest and tenderest 
eloquence and effectiveness, every feeling of regard 
and veneration 'which I myself entertain for our 
illustrious guest. I could not but feel that such a 
welcome was worthy the occasion. So to have lived 
as to have deserved that welcome is surely an 
example and a stimulus to every one of us. Men do 
not come to such honours easily ; rewards of that 
kind are not plucked off-handedly. I was not, there- 
fore, sorry that the address of welcome was read, 
and that in measured, forceful, noble terms that 
gave a worthy welcome to a man whom we have 
so long loved and honoured and desired to see. 
Tweuty-three years ago there was a man in this 
country who, bidding farewell to England, I think 
at a meeting in Liverpool, said, "It is not likely 
that I shall ever return to this country ; I am now 
fifty years of age, and at that time men do not make 
great changes ; I feel, therefore, that I am bidding 
you farewell." That man is sitting on the platform 
to-night. I should like to know his estimate of 
fifty years of age now. I dare say he looks upon 
men only half a century old as young and inex- 
perienced. It is wonderful how we accommodate 
ourselves to the revolution of years, and how age 
is not a question of figures on a dial plate, but 
some kind of subtle feeling that keeps the heart 
young and ardent and hopeful down to the very 
last. I am not going to prophesy that Mr. Beecher 
will not come back again. If he felt so very old at 
fifty, I have hope of him ; he is now getting over 
it. So whilst I sympathise very thoroughly with 



54 WELCOME BY THE 

the spirit of trie words which conclude the address 
of welcome, I still have a kind of secret hope, which 
I will not venture to express in definite terms, that 
even yet Mr. Beech er may be amongst us. When 
the day comes he will he the more welcome for 
what he has said to us to-night. There are one of 
two courses to be taken with regard to such a man 
as Mr. Beecher. Either read little newspaper para- 
graphs that are anonymous and unauthenticated 
and garbled, and form your opinion upon the man 
from these paragraphic misrepresentations ; or read 
such a speech as he has delivered to-night, especially 
hear it, for the speech was as much in the tone as in 
the words, in the tears as in the eloquence, and form 
your own opinon upon what the man himself has said, 
and the spirit in which he has said it. If any man 
can have heard the speech which has been delivered 
to-night, and have yielded himself to the influence of 
the hour, and yet go away and speak one unkind 
word of our distinguished visitor, I do not envy the 
disposition or the conscience of such a man. The 
whirligig of time goes round, and in the long run, 
when men have an opportunity of fully unfolding 
themselves and expressing what is in their mind 
and heart regarding the unseen but ever-coming 
kingdom of Jesus Christ, they are better understood 
and more highly appreciated and honoured. The 
testimony with which Mr. Beecher concluded sends 
me home determined to live a simpler, truer, deeper, 
holier life. To hear such a man say that if he 
began life again and had all vocations set before him 
he would choose to stand by the Cross and interpret 
the redeeming Christ to the age, rids one of all 
doubt and fear and unworthy feeling, and makes one 
feel the ordaining hand once more set upon the head, 
and as if all the air were filled with holy impulse 
and sacred stimulus. And if he leaves this effect 
behind him, speak against him who may, doubt him 



LONDON CONGEEGATIONAL BOAED. 55 

who may, we will be unfaithful to this hour if we 
do not stand up and say : " It was good to be near 
him when he spake and when he prayed." 

The motion was carried by acclamation. 

Mr. Beechee, in responding, said : You have 
made me very happy, and yet your praise and sym- 
pathy lie like a cloud upon me. I wish I were all 
that you think I am, and I wish I was what I have 
in my mind all the time and try to be. But I am 
not to be tried before the bar of men ; I am what I 
am by the grace of God, and I am ever more with 
Jesus in my thought by day and by night. I love 
my own, and I love where I love very deeply ; but 
God knows that I love Jesus Christ above all words 
and all thoughts, and all other feelings. And yet 
I thank you for your cordiality. I shall bear it 
home, not to repeat it again unless it be to my 
children. They have an interest in me that not 
even my church has, and to them I shall rehearse 
your great goodness. 

The Chairman closed the proceedings by pronouncing the 
Benediction. 



ADDRESS TO THE CATERHAM 
CONGREGATIONAL SCHOOL. 



Mr. and Mes. Beecher having arranged to pay a private 
visit to Mr. and Mrs. James Clarke at their residence, 
Beechhanger, Caterham, Surrey, an earnest hope was ex- 
pressed that Mr. Beecher would take the opportunity of giving 
an Address to the 137 Boys of the Congregational School, 
located in the valley, which he very kindly consented to do. 
It was then thought desirable that the speech should be made 
in the Congregational church, and that the dwellers in the dis- 
trict should be invited to attend. The meeting was arranged 
for Tuesday, Oct. 12, and notwithstanding the heavy and con- 
stant rain, the gathering was a capital one, not less than four 
hundred persons being present. Mr. James Clarke having 
taken the Chair, the proceedings were begun by Eev. Josiah 
Viney offering prayer. Mr. Beecher then delivered the follow- 
ing Address : — 

Life, and How to Live It. 

I came hither, knowing nothing of the neighbour- 
hood or of the school, principally to have the great 
pleasure of visiting my friend, Mr. Clarke, in his 
home, not because he was a clergyman, but because 
he was a cause why a clergyman could be heard. 
His paper makes every man who has preached a 
sermon preach it to fifty times his own congregation 
and more, and by thus diffusing the sermons of 
different and able men gives them an extension, and 
reacts also upon the sermon-maker, givinghim alarger 



CATEEHAM CONGEE GATIONAL SCHOOL. 57 

idea and scope. And so I regard him as perhaps 
more a clergyman in ink than many persons are in 
voice, and consider him of the brotherhood of 
preachers. 

I was asked if I would say some things to the 
young students in the Congregational school here, 
Congregational ministers' sons. Every one of you 
has got a minister for a father, have you not? 
Well, I had a minister for my father, and a very 
good man he was too. The Greeks have a proverb, 
and it is a very saucy one, which may be true in 
Greece but it is not true among English-speaking 
people — that the minister's son is the devil's grandson. 
This had great currency in our country, and the 
Massachusetts Sabbath-school Union instituted a 
series of observations to ascertain whether ministers' 
and deacons' children were worse than other folks', 
and it was found that they were a great deal better 
on an average ; and we turned that proverb and all 
like it out of doors, for it has been shown that the 
most eminent and successful men in our land in 
every walk of life have been largely drawn from 
ministers and deacons. That is to say, from men 
whose life was based upon a moral principle instead 
of upon mere secular, and expedient ways. I was 
brought up in Connecticut, on a remote hill-top. I 
never heard in my father's house a sentence uttered 
by him or any of the older members of my family, 
which now in my later and more mature judgment 
should not have been spoken. I never heard my 
father say a word that led me to feel that a man 
should look after his private and personal interest 
first in this world and religion afterwards. I grew 
up into boyhood with the feeling that there was no 
reason for living except that of being good and 
doing good. My father had six sons, and everyone 
of them went into the ministry. "We were a preach- 
ing set. In my own family the tendency has run 



58 ADDEESS TO THE 

out. My boys have gone into something else, but 
in other and collateral branches the name still goes 
on in the direction of preaching. 

Now you will understand, young gentlemen, that 
I have a great interest in you because you are the 
children of ministers, as I am ; we are all boys to- 
gether here to-night, and I am going to talk to you. 
And if there is anybody outside of you and at the 
back of you that wants to hear, they must become 
as little children, or they shall in no case enter into 
this speech. It is not for them to criticise to-night, 
or to dislike as if I was talking to them. I have 
my audience right here and before me. 

I hold that there is a great deal, as I have already 
intimated, in descending from a parentage that not 
simply carries with it personal morality, but where 
righteousness is in the stock. We have in the Old 
Testament the recognition that God continues His 
blessing to those that are obedient to His commands 
to the third and fourth generation ; and statistics 
have shown abundantly that where righteousness or 
manliness according to the plan of God is inherent 
in the parents the probability is that it will be a 
birthright to the children. It will be easier for 
them to become Christians and to live Christianly 
than it would be if they were the children of parents 
without religion. There is a birthright in being the 
child of an eminent Christian man or Christian 
woman. I have lived myself to be an observer of 
things for, more than fifty years, and I have lived to 
see that the most powerful education which takes 
hold of the young is that which comes from the life, 
disposition, and example of the father and of the 
mother. I have seen multitudes of men that flung 
off from the ways of the Church, flung off from the 
religious teaching of their times and surroundings. 
They went through a score of years or more, and 
yet never could get rid of the feeling of that saint, 



CATEEHAM CONGREGATIONAL SCHOOL. 5$ 

their mother. However far they wandered, however 
long the thread, the silver cord at length did 
begin to draw, and in old age or ripe manhood 
I have seen multitudes of men who gave this 
testimony, that through all their wickedness and 
all their dissents and negative states of mind, 
they never could get from the belief of their 
mother's faith, founded on their mother's disposition 
and example. It is a great thing to have come 
down from a praying stock — from men that love 
God and love their fellow-men, and there is laid 
upon the young a responsibility on that very score 
— because of your heritage — because of your 
parents, mother and father. It behoves the children 
of the Gospel, if I may so call them, to live more 
morally, with a higher moral impulse, than any- 
body else's children. Now I want to say a few 
words on the supposition that either you will be 
ministers, or that you will not, for I think that it 
may be said that that is true. You may become 
clergymen or preachers and live professionally for 
the propagation of moral influence through moral 
truth ; but, whether that is so or not, I hold that 
a man is not any the less a preacher because he 
does not stand in churchly relations. It is the duty 
of every man that is a Christian to be a preacher. 
It is the duty of every man, if he be a merchant , 
or if he be a lawyer, that he should be a witness 
for the reality of personal, spiritual religion — the 
need of all men to have communion with the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and with God through Him. I hold 
that frequently the only persons that can approach 
men in the world are not professional ministers, but 
are men in other and civic relations. Men get to be 
professionally hardened. They say : " Why, of 
course, our minister preaches. That is his business. 
That is what he is paid for ; and he believes, or 
assumes that he believes, in these great doctrines 



60 ADDEESS TO THE 

of the Gospel and in the duties that are connected 
with them. Why, yes, of course. It is an ill bird 
that fouls its own nest, and the minister could not 
go back on himself and on his church." That has 
no great influence with me or among men. But 
where a lawyer, known to be able, is also a witness, 
both by his life and by his testimony, for the truth 
of religion, there are many men that will listen to 
him, and who would not listen to a clergyman. 
Where a man who is doing business in a banker's or 
in a broker's office, and is resisting those tempta- 
tions that are supposed to cling to the making of 
money, shows himself to be a genuine and true 
Christian, he can give testimonies which a profes- 
sional minister cannot give ; and there are many 
that can be reached by non-professional Christians 
that could not be reached by the professional 
ministry itself. So, then, I hold it to be a very 
good thing for you to remember, as you grow older, 
that, though you may not, perhaps, ever stand in a 
pulpit, you ought to stand as a witness for the truth 
of the Gospel as it is in Jesus Christ, both by your 
example and by your teaching likewise. 

Now that you are growing up there are a great 
many things that you know in a sort of way, but 
there are some which may be told you by another, 
a stranger, one not of your own country, yet of 
your own lineage and race, and that I am. You 
cannot crowd me out because I was born in America. 
Well, it is a much bigger country than this is. We 
could swallow England in our continent, and 
scarcely know that we had had a meal. And that 
is not all. We own you. We own everything that 
you have got. We own your laws, and we own your 
churches, and we own your history, and we own 
everything that is good. We reject the bad, but 
everything that is good in the English language we 
have appropriated to ourselves on the other side. 



CATEEHAM CONGEE GATI0NAL SCHOOL. 61 

And so when I come back to my father's house, my 
own old patrimony, I am not to be crowded out 
and have it said that I am a foreigner. I am not a 
foreigner. I am an Englishman — an American 
Englishman — and none the worse for being born in 
a bigger place. 

The first thing that I wish to say to you young 
gentlemen — it is too late for some of the older boys 
here to-night — the first thing that I want to say is 
that the foundation of success in life is good health. 
Multitudes of men have good health that never do 
anything with it, but there are multitudes of men 
that are capable of doing a great deal which they do 
not do because they have not got good health. 
There are a great many men who fritter away 
their youth and destroy wholly the strength of 
their constitution, so that when by-and-by they 
come to be in the press of life and under all its 
exacting influences they break down. And that is 
not all. I have reason to believe that a good deal of 
the theology of the past has sprung from dyspepsia ; 
that a great deal of the tormenting aspects that 
have been given to the sweetness of Divine truth 
has arisen from the melancholia of men that have 
lost digestion, or who have enthroned the blue 
devils in their liver. I hold, therefore, that health 
is morality to a large extent — the foundation of it, 
anyhow. But see. In the first place you may have 
everything else in the world, and lacking that, all 
the rest of the world is good for nothing. "What 
sort of pleasure has a man that sits in a ball-saloon 
and sees dancing and gaiety, if he has got the 
gout ? What sort of pleasure does he take in it ? 
What sort of pleasure will a man have, though he 
be rich in over measure, and his walls are hung with 
pictures, if he is corrugated with rheumatism ? 
There is not anything handsome in the world to 
rheumatism. What sort of charm is there to men 



62 ADDRESS TO THE 

who have neuralgia — whose nerves are all up in 
rebellion against them, who say at night, " I would 
God it were morning," and in the morning, "I 
would God it were night ! " To be patient, to be 
decent, is about all the virtue that men can attain 
to who are tormented with the want of health. 
Frequently a man who has spent the substance and 
marrow of his nerve-system in his youth, through 
ignorance, through self-indulgence, through wrong 
courses, when he is reformed and begins to be an 
operative Christian man in the community finds 
that he has no constitution ; and a man with- 
out any constitution is like a cannon with a corn- 
stalk carriage under- it, and every time he fires it off 
he knocks the carriage over, and by-and-by destroys 
it entirely. I have known a great many men lie for 
half their lives on the ground like a dismounted 
cannon, simply because they had not physical health 
and constitution ; and under those circumstances 
men waste half their strength to patch up their 
health, and to enable them to go on and do the 
things which others do by instinct, and almost 
without consciousness. If I may be allowed to 
speak of myself — and I will be allowed to speak of 
myself, because I think that a man's own experience 
is the best part, generally, of his testimony — I attri- 
bute my success in life primarily and fundamentally 
to the fact that I have had absolutely perfect health. 
I hardly know what pain means. I have never known 
exhaustion that I could not sleep out in one night. 
In the day I work like a man writing on a slate, and 
night is the sponge that comes and wipes it all out, 
and I begin again fresh the next morning. Not only 
that, but health makes a man good-natured, and I am 
going to speak about that particularly for a moment. 
A man has a flow of animal spirits and gaiety, and 
he enjoys himself in perfect health. He enjoys 
himself to such an extent that the natural buoyancy 



CATERHAM CONGREGATIONAL SCHOOL. 63 

of a person in health is to a large extent all the excite- 
ment that he wants, and he is not easily temptable 
by things that are ruin, and which so many young 
men fall into to their destruction, soul and body. 

Good health is the indispensable condition to 
comfort and success in life. I have seen a great 
many men spending the best part — the two-thirds 
of their earlier years — to acquire riches, and when 
they had got them the riches could not make them 
happy. I have known men that went into profes- 
sional life, and in the strivings and conflicts and 
intense provocations of life they consumed the vital 
element in them of strength and health ; and all the 
remunerations of place and influence and honour 
and glory were as nothing to them. The foundation 
of real activity, and the foundation of normal con- 
ditions of disposition, lies in good substantial sound 
health. Do not waste it. Do not drain your nervous 
system dry. Do not allow yourself to go through 
any such courses as shall make you a wretched 
victim in all the four-fifths of your life, for the sake 
of some little pleasure in the one-fifth of your early 
and your ignorant life. Stand up. Be brave. Have 
a good body, and do not be afraid of using it. Live 
in the air, breathe the air ; do not crawl into a hole. 

Well, next to good health I place the source of 
unconscious influence, which ought to be the best 
influence of everybody. I hold with cheerfulness, 
hopefulness, and courage, in distinction from what 
we usually call sobriety. I hold that we should not 
take an ascetic view of life and feel that a man 
ought to have a very grave and sorrowful counte- 
nance. I hear men sometimes talking an immense 
deal of nonsense. I hear men saying, and I have 
seen it in books, that every man should live in such 
a way that if death should come to him he would be 
found in a posture in which he would be willing to 
appear before God. Suppose that a man were sick 



64 ADDEESS TO THE 

and had just taken an emetic. 
And so long as a man is, by the providence of G-od, 
made to live here and to have his duties here, here 
is the place where he ought to conform to his duties. 
When it is time for you to die, God will give you 
dying grace. It is for you to find out how to live 
with living grace, and not all the time to live as if 
you were just going to die. I recollect a man giving 
a comical direction in the newspapers. " The way 
to avoid breaking your bones in a car when there is 
an accident is, as far as possible, to put yourself in 
the shape of a ball. Fold yourself up together, so 
that there shall be no salient bones to snap off. And 
as this cannot be done when the accident takes 
place, it is better that you should go into the car 
and roll up into a ball and make your journey in 
that shape." It is very much in that spirit that 
men say that you ought to be very solemn and very 
sober. There are times for a man to be sober, and 
there are times for a man to be solemn ; but the 
average dispositions in your life should be those of 
cheerfulness and hopefulness. You should live in a 
state of present happiness ; for I hold it to be the 
duty of every man to be happy — not by any way, 
but by legitimate ways. " The earth is the Lord's, 
and the fulness thereof; " and I am the Lord's, and 
He is my Father, and I am His son ; and I have a 
right to say to the moon, " Come, cheer me," and 
to the sun, "Come and awake me, and give me 
joy." The birds are all mine, and the grass is mine, 
and the trees. No matter who owns the house, I 
am the man that enjoys it. I like the groves ; I 
like everything that is in beautiful grounds. They 
are all for me, simply because I enjoy them. I find 
that happiness is just as virtuous as moping melan- 
choly, and a good deal more so. A man that has a 
melancholy disposition, or a man that has been per- 
verted by ascetic views of religion, may be a very 



CATEEHAM CONGEE OATIONAL SCHOOL. 65 

good man before God, but he is a very poor sort of 
a fellow among men, and we do not want such. 
The old teaching was a little different from this ; 
but I say to myself, and have said to myself, I have 
gone through about as much trouble as any of you 
ever will, and I have not got many wrinkles yet. I 
do not look on life with a dark eye. I think that 
life is beautiful, and the world is beautiful, and men 
and women seem to me to be not monsters. I love 
them. I am in sympathy with them. I have 
affinities with them, and a spirit of compassion. I 
belong to them, and they all belong to me ; and 
especially little children : they are all mine. 

Now, having come to be seventy-three years old, 
I am able to make that testimony, namely, that I 
know very few people that are as happy as I am ; 
and one of the reasons is this. I understood from a 
very early period that God gave me my castle, and 
he said: " I appoint you commander there, and do 
not let any traitors in, and, among other things, 
moping melancholy. Never let him come in ; and 
care and anxiety — never let them come in. Watch, 
and if ever you see anxiety or care kick him right 
out as a part of your allegiance to God. Kick him 
out/' Well, I have undertaken to act in that way, 
and, although I have had to fight for it sometimes, 
in the end I have got him out — very largely, too, in 
this way. I said, " God meant me to represent the 
spirit of trust in God and faith in His providence 
and in the love of Jesus Christ. One thing I know 
— that I do not love myself one half as much as 
Jesus Christ loves me." I do not want any more 
than that. " Let your conversation," says the 
Apostle, " be without covetousness," that is, anxiety 
about your affairs. "Let your conversation be 
without covetousness, and be content with such 
things as ye have ; for He hath said I will, never 
leave thee nor forsake thee ; so that I may boldly 



bb ADDRESS TO THE 

say, the Lord is my helper. I will not fear what 
man shall do rmto me." The man who takes his 
life in his hand thus will not only he healthier and 
happier, but a world more useful than if he prac- 
tised on the other scale, and in the old gloomy, 
moping, melancholy considerations. 

Well, there are some other points well worthy of 
consideration. There is a great mistake found 
among men as regards the selection of their busi- 
ness. The young are not capacitated to do it, but 
somebody ought to do it for them. If there was 
any way in which you could educate yourself to 
that kind of business that you were best fitted for, 
that would be a very great element of success and 
happiness of your life. There are a great many 
men that are too ambitious, or their father and 
mother are ambitious for them, and they try to get 
them to take what are called " respectable " callings 
and avocations, and they put their children, there- 
fore, into positions which they are not capable of 
filling, and all their life is either an up-hill work, a 
tugging after the thing which they cannot do, or 
else it is a life of feigning, a life of expedience. It 
is a great deal better that a man should be a suc- 
cessful carpenter, than that he should be a poor 
minister of the Gospel. It is a great deal 
better that a man should be a successful black- 
smith than that he should be a drivelling 
lawyer. And I hold that anything by which 
you can serve your God by your success is respect- 
able. Do not be afraid of going into work. Do not 
be afraid of taking lowly positions. In that regard 
we have a word from the Master, " When thou art 
invited to a feast take not the highest place, lest a 
worthier than thou come, and the master say, Go 
down. Go down." " But," he says, " take the 
lowest ; " and he, seeing you with surprise, will say, 
" What, my friend ! What are you away down here 



CATEEHAM CONGEE GATI0NAL SCHOOL. 67 

for ? Go up. Go up." Do not try to begin at the top. 
Begin right over against yourself. If you be at the 
bottom or in the middle, work your way to the top, 
and. do not be too anxious to succeed, in life before 
you have earned success. That is what I call 
stealing — where a man is carrying honours upon 
himself which he really has not earned and does 
not deserve — where a man is patting on the appear- 
ances by which it would seem as if he had made 
himself a successful man. But that is very much 
as if a man would make himself fat by stuffing 
pillows under his jacket, and become robust by 
padding. And so there are a great many men who 
suppose that their office is going to hold them up. 
They are going to join a profession that gives to 
them a name, and a certain sort of position. But 
be proud to earn your way in life, and begin where 
you can do the things that will earn you first that 
and then the second ; and let the affairs of life call 
you up step by step. Do not force your way. Do 
not commit burglary on success. 

Then I wish that I could make you feel as strongly 
as I feel the desirableness of honour and the hateful- 
ness of meanness. Of necessity, mixing as much as 
I do among men, I see a good deal of very sad and 
mortifying things among men who ought to know 
better. I see a good deal of whispering, backbiting, 
indirect slandering. I see a good many things in the 
way of suppression of the truth indirectly. There 
is nothing in this world that is so noble as a clean- 
minded man — clean in his passions, clean in his 
carriage, and clean in the law of truth and in the 
honour of integrity and in all the beneficence of love. 
Society is full of mean ways, and through them 
success often seems to be nearer ; but this success is, 
like the apples of Sodom, beautiful from afar to look 
upon, but, when you have plucked it, full of ashes 
and bitterness. I think that a man ought so to live 



88 ADDEESS TO THE 

by a standard of honour, truth, and manliness, that 
lie can afford to sleep with himself without any fear 
or trouble. I wonder that some men can ever keep 
-company with themselves. It is bad company. 
But if a man, on the other hand, lives to practise 
only the nobler and benevolent virtues of life, no 
matter what comes to him, everybody becomes his 
friend; for our Scripture says, "For a just man no 
one will be found to die, but, peradventure, for a 
good man some one might be found to die ; " and, 
in this comparison between goodness and mere justice 
or conscientiousness in this life, how much less would 
anybody be in sympathy with a man who not only 
was not just lacking goodness, but was just the 
other way, and by slimy arts and by indecorous 
ways was climbing along forbidden paths, and 
seeking a notoriety which he calls "influence" 
and "successful ambition"? So be truthful ; be 
upright ; be honest, and hate a lie. Hate a lie ! A 
liar is worse than the man who has got the plague. 
You cannot afford to be liars ; and you cannot afford 
"to be truth-speakers unless you live worthy of the 
truth. I think among the most beautiful persons I 
■ever knew were the Quakers. I am myself a 
Quaker, all except doctrine and conduct. I am cer- 
tainly an admirer of them, and some of the sweetest 
natures and some of the most truthful souls that 
I ever met were among them. Among their funda- 
mental qualities is the avoidance of untruth and 
exaggeration. They attempt to live on the capital 
doctrine of "Yea, yea; nay, nay," believing that 
whatsoever is more than that is of evil. 

Well, allow me to say still further, as to the 
foundation of your strength, remember that you in 
your own strength and in your own mere self are 
weakness itself. But in God nobody can break you. 
There is a negro woman in America called Sojourner 
Truth ; or was, she has recently died. This hap- 



CATEEHAM CONGREGATIONAL SCHOOL. 69 

pened in Boston once. When Douglas — who was 
born a slave, and who ran away and made himself 
one of the most powerful orators that we had in the 
great battle of anti-slavery in America — was speak- 
ing in Boston, in the most profound discouragement 
before the war, as to the prospects of his race, he 
said, " We cannot emigrate to Africa. That will 
never do. And we cannot fill up Canada. It is not 
favourable to our race. And we are denied all 
privileges in America; " and he went on descanting 
on that and drawing the picture, as he could, darker 
and darker until it seemed as though doom itself 
was to settle down on the coloured people ; and as 
he sat down, Sojourner Truth, a little, crumpled- 
up black woman, black as your hat, rose in the 
audience, and said, "Frederick, is God dead?" and 
she sat down. It shook the whole audience. As 
long as God is alive, and you know it and feel it r 
you need not fear anything. You are dearer to Him 
than you are to your parents, or to your teachers, 
or to your best friend. There is no friend like God,, 
either in adversity or in prosperity, in sickness or 
in health. There is no such friend as God, and 
there is no man so strong, so lasting, so enduring, 
as the man that feels " I am the Lord's. He is 
mine." There was an eminent bishop of the Boman 
Catholic Church in Italy who was charged, by an 
infamous conspiracy of courtiers and corrupt women, 
with having violated his great position, and it 
seemed as though he had come to his end. The 
court withdrew its favour, and everywhere through- 
out the community his name was becoming a by- 
word and a hissing. He refused to say a word. He 
refused to let his brother, who was a lawyer, plead 
his cause ; and he simply said this, " I am God's. 
This thing has not been sent upon me by the devil. 
The Lord has permitted it. He has His own 
reason. As long as He thinks it is best for Him' 



70 ADDEESS TO THE 

and me and His cause that I should be in this 
trouble, I think it is best too, and I will not do one 
single thing to change the condition ; and when the 
Lord thinks that it is time He will take care of me." 
And in that sublime position of simple trust he 
went on doing his duty day and night, in season and 
out of season, waiting and saying, "I can bear 
whatever Christ thinks that I ought to bear." And 
sure enough, after a little while the principal con- 
spirator in the court was taken sick, and on his 
death-bed he made confession of the whole nefarious 
plot, and it was ripped up, and the whole public 
sentiment was changed, and the bishop was brought 
out into light and repute again. But he refused to 
say anything. He felt, " The Lord wanted me 
there, and I was there. If He wants me now here, 
and I am here, what then?" For one to feel that 
he is the child of God and under the protection of 
Divine providence — we cannot imagine what an 
armour it is, what a fort it is, what strength it will 
give. 

And now, my dear young friends. I shall never 
see you, probably, again. I cannot carry away your 
countenances with me, but I can carry away the 
general impression that I have here to-night. Oh, 
you that will have to go out into the world, I do not 
know that I would shield you from it if I could ; 
but I have a tender feeling for a man that has got 
to begin and buffet his way in the world. Some of 
you will sicken. Within a year or two some of you 
will be called home. For you there is to be no 
sorrow and no tears. Early home is thrice blest. 
But others of you will go on through good report, 
and through evil report, and by-and-by, one by one, 
you will come to the gate and be received through 
it. But whether you die early or live long, while 
you live, live for Christ ; live for your fellow men. 
Do not live in a centre and whirr of selfishness. 



CATEKHAM CONGEE GATIONAL SCHOOL. 71 

Do not live for pleasure, though you will be happy 
all the time if you live for duty. Live with cheers 
and mirth, if God has given it to you. Live with 
good fellowship ; live with amusement, if it be 
decorous and wholesome. Live for manhood with 
greater or less success, as it may please God to 
furnish you. Live hoping, genial, happy to the 
end; and may the unspeakable love of Jesus Christ 
be to you and to all His people. God grant that 
when, through the storm and through the dark, the 
light breaks and the morning has come, you and I 
may meet at last inseparably in the kingdom of our 
dear Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Good-bye. 

At the end of the Address a resolution of thanks to Mr. 
Beecher was moved byBev. W. Heather, M.A., the pastor of 
the church, seconded by Mr. W. G. Soper, B.A., J.P., was 
carried unanimously and with cheers. Eev. T. Btjdd, B.A., 
proposed thanks to the Chairman for his kindness in bringing 
Mr. Beecher to Caterham, which Mr. Henry Mason 
seconded, and the meeting was then brought to a close by the 
singing of the doxology. 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 



The City Temple was on Friday morning, Oct. 15, filled with 
an audience, consisting mainly of ministers and students for 
the ministry, to hear an address from Mr. Beeches, on 
"Preaching." Kev. Dr. Parker occupied the chair. After 
prayer, offered by Rev. Dr. Newth, Principal of New 
College, 

The Chairman said : The history of this Conference is 
happily a short one. Some little time ago I received a letter 
from the secretary of the associated colleges of London, asking 
me to request Mr. Beecher to spend, if he possibly could do so, 
an evening with them for the purpose of talking over questions 
relating to their work and prospects as students for the 
Christian ministry. As in duty bound, I laid the letter before 
Mr. Beecher. Having perused it, he said : " This gives me the 
right idea, why not enlarge the scope and bring in others who 
may not be nominally students, that we may talk over together 
some of the great questions in which we are in common deeply 
interested." I do not imagine that it entered Mr. Beecher's 
fancy that by enlarging the constituency a little he would see 
before him this morning such a host of earnest men, charged 
with affection and enthusiasm towards himself and his work. A 
week has not only a beginning but an ending:. Some weeks 
begin rather cloudily and end in infinite sunshine. I may add 
that we could not have held a conference at eleven o'clock on a 
college working morning but for the consent and co-operation 
of the Principals of the various colleges. I thought it courtesy 
to address the Principals in view of this arrangement, and in 
every instance the answer showed the greatest readiness to re- 
adjust any college work attaching to any particular day with a 
view of making this Conference all that the students could 
desire it to be. I shall be glad, therefore, if the Principals will 
now thus publicly receive my acknowledgments of their kind 
co-operation. Mr. Beecher is to address us ; I cannot attempt 



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ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 78 

to appoint the bounds of his expository or rhetorical habitation. 
The best programme that can be written for Mr. Beecher is in 
one line, " Loose him, and let him go." Not understanding the 
English character, he has actually, in some degree at least, 
proposed to receive questions which may be addressed to him, 
for the purpose of at least considering them. It is one thing to 
ask a question and another thing to answer it. If I were to ask 
some of you junior students what is the cause of the Aurora 
Borealis, you would be very glad to hand on the inquiry to the 
next man. I understand that the questions must have relation 
to the subject of Mr. Beecher's address, that they must, of 
course, be pertinent and practical, that they must be such ques- 
tions as earnest men alone would think of putting. Later on in 
the Conference I shall have another kind of statement to make ; 
in the meantime, I sifc down, simply asking Mr. Beecher to be 
kind enough to proceed with his address. 

In troductory Remarks . 

Mr. Beecher: (Cries of "Pulpit.") I will not. 
You know, or ought to know, my feelings about 
a pulpit. I regard it as a barrier between the 
preacher and his audience, and such of you as 
cannot come into communion and sympathy 
from your altitude will have to remain in the 
Court of the Gentiles. The men to whom I am to 
speak are before me and near me, and the bond of 
sympathy will not therefore be broken by distance 
and by the wide stretch of the impalpable air. I 
consented to this interview, which of necessity 
must be more or less familiar and colloquial, be- 
cause I once was a young minister and had my own 
troubles and difficulties, and in the course of a long 
life, now fifty years in my public ministry, I have 
been brought into contact at home and abroad, in 
times of peace, and in times of war, in the midst 
of theological discussion and ecclesiastical ruptures, 
— I have been made to see almost every side and 
every phase of the work of the Christian ministry. 
But one who has gone through so long a campaign 
is bound, I think, to respect the wishes of the 



74 ADDBESS TO STUDENTS. 

young. As an old veteran in the camp is bound 
to be the teacher of the recruit, and to show kind- 
ness to him, and to strengthen him in preparing 
for the battle, so they that have grown old in the 
work of the ministry should recognise the rights of 
those that are but beginning, and give whatever 
light their experience and their reflections may have 
produced — give freely. In answering questions it 
has already been suggested that I do not undertake 
to irradiate the whole scope of theology, and that 
there be many questions that ought not to be put, 
and many questions that are casuistical that belong 
to special lines of thought as organised in different 
denominations, the answer to which would require 
the discussion of the foundations of theology, of 
the methods of worship, and the organisation of 
Christian assemblies, and I should need rather to 
sit in a professor's chair and have a whole year 
before me than to have the single hour which be- 
longs to our Session here. 

Is the Pulpit Losing its Poioer ? 

Now, in the first place, let us ask — Is that true 
which is being reported up and down through the 
papers ? Has the pulpit lost its power ? Is it going 
to lose it? Are there agencies of instruction in 
religion dispossessing it of the public ear ? Was its 
power the fact that it rose in an ignorant age, and 
that it has, therefore, by the very law of develop- 
ment dug its own funeral and put itself out of power ? 
What is the power of the pulpit primarily ? It is 
the power of preaching ; for though there is some- 
thing else in the minister's life except the preaching, 
this is its central and characteristic element, and the 
question may therefore be changed, not " Is the 
pulpit losing its power? " but " Is preaching losing 
its power ? " Now, I hold that preaching is simply 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 75 

the extension of that which has existed from the 
beginning, and in all forms of society, all conditions 
and institutions, it is the application of personal 
emotion and thought to living people. It is not 
teaching alone, though it may he teaching and 
should be teaching, but it is the power of one living 
man to lay himself, with his thought and his 
emotion, on the heart and intelligence of another 
living man. Now go back to the very beginning, 
the mother is the first preacher. It is not always 
the wisdom of what she says, it is not always the 
scope of her knowledge, it is not always the things 
that she believes, but her mother's heart murmur- 
ing to the child's heart, that is preaching, that is the 
thing that is power, and in its very origin ! If you 
go out from the family you may not see it in so 
affecting a manner, but you will see it in friendships, 
where, for instance, friend with friend is discussing; 
there is everything besides the mere theme in the 
connection between the speaker and the hearer ; 
there is the throb of the man's heart ; there are all 
those fine filaments of feeling ; all those elements of 
imagination that go to constitute individual person- 
alities, and friend talking with friend is a power 
quite over and above what he says or what he 
believes. And go on to the teacher, the same is true 
of him. There are many maidens who have many 
calls, but are hard-hearted towards them ; but when 
the true preacher comes to them — one word from 
his lips is more influential with her than all the rest 
of them put together. He has the art of putting a 
living heart on a living heart, and that is power. 
That is the root of preaching ; I do not undertake 
to say that it absorbs into itself everything, I shall 
have occasion to speak of that a little further on. 
Now, I hold that emotion with intellect, emotion as 
the bow and the intellect as the arrow, that is 
preaching, that is the philosophy of it in a figure. 



76 ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 

A man must have faith or everything falls dead or 
becomes a mere lectureship. There are many things 
on which a man speaking cannot be a preacher. I 
could not gush if I were discussing the question of 
crystallography ; I could not have any great 
emotion to send home if I were dealing with the 
higher mathematics. So, in regard to many kinds 
of truth, there cannot in the nature of things 
be anything that goes higher than lecturing. Lec- 
turing is intellectual exposition, legitimate, indis- 
pensable in its own place, and in regard to its own 
subjects ; but preaching is something higher than 
that ; it is that that is in common be ween the 
preacher and the hearer, it is that that belongs 
jointly to the sphere of thought and of feeling, and 
it has in it a definite purpose or end in view, which 
it is seeking by thought and by emotion to procure 
in the minds of all that are listening to it. It has 
in it, therefore, the element of thought and the 
element of emotion, and the element of persuasion, 
and the element of acquiescence in the audience, for 
they act back and fore, the preacher on the audience 
and the audience on the preacher. Now, with 
regard to this I do not hesitate to say that it is the 
one power that cannot have a parallel, and that, 
beginning in the lowest conditions of social life, the 
family, and the friendship, and the neighbourhood 
and the school, it has its noblest development in the 
church of Christ Jesus. We may not have " aposto- 
licity " as the word goes, we may not have absolute 
orthodoxy, if any one can tell you what that is. We 
may have a variety of gifts, but there is one gift 
that belongs to the Church universal, which the 
Church universal should see to it that it is not dis- 
possessed of, and that is to take the grandest 
themes that can come to the thought of man — time, 
life, character, conduct, immortality, and the hope 
of it, God and man, and the universe. These be 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 77 

the themes, and the method is the ripening of a 
man's moral consciousness in such a way as that he 
can pour out his soul like a flood upon listening and 
acquiescing men. That is the gift to the Church. 
The one instrument that belongs to the Church, 
the organ, that manifold grand instrument, and 
that is in itself the resume, if I might say so, of all 
the instruments that have ever, separately and 
singly, been created ; it belongs to the Church, thank 
God, to the cathedral, to the temple, and tu every 
little church everywhere. It is understood and 
known to be its possession. Preaching and music, 
sacred and organic, belong to the church, and 
the church is bound to see that it is not dispos- 
sessed of its peculiar treasures. It may be this gift 
and art of preaching may not be used, it may be 
overcrowded, it may be laid aside by novelties, or 
by habit or custom in any community, but it 
is there, it can be resumed again. It may be 
weak in one generation, it comes up again in 
the next. In some hands it may be compara- 
tively powerless, but there are others in whose 
hands it has a power the equal of which does 
not exist among men. Yes, preaching is over- 
laid oftentimes by psychical discussions, and by all 
manner of things, but it is not dead or smothered. 
Unrolling the mummies of 3,000 years ago, that 
have laid meditating upon theology in their tombs, 
it has been found that there was the Egyptian wheat 
wrapped up in their gums, and so preserved from 
the air for 3,000 years, and yet you take that wheat 
out to-day and plant it, and it sprouts and grows as 
if it had had no vacation at all. Preaching may 
be wrapped up in cerements and gummed in one 
way and another, but by-and-by the time will come 
that somebody will unroll it and get it out, and it 
goes right on as if it had not had an hour's pause. 
When you come to compare the whole complex 



78 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

influence of the organic church you find it has a 
school, it has a benevolent board, and round about 
the church or the cathedral there are a hundred 
officers, ministrants, and God's servants, all more 
or less auxiliary and indispensable in their ranks 
and degrees ; but preaching stands alone — higher 
than any of them, the leader of them all — it is the 
highest function ! And yet I hear men saying that 
the day is come when the newspaper is going to dis- 
possess preaching. The newspaper is the carrier of 
preaching, it is a carrier of news ; newspapers do 
not invent news, or ought not to. But it is a matter 
of gratitude that the newspaper has come into 
existence, and that it is widening the bounds of its 
power, and that it has become really in fellowship 
with Christian truth and Christian service. But, 
then, what is the mail-bag compared with the lover 
that has got his letters in it ? It is a carrier, not an 
originator, in regard to the themes which mostly 
appertain to the moral and religious life of the com- 
munity, although it is going to widen the sphere of 
the pulpit, and is going materially to react again 
on the habits of preaching. For a man in a pulpit 
in a little neighbourhood, with a clique of men that 
believe just as he thinks, goes over and over again, 
and narrows himself, or tends to do it, or is dessi- 
cated and gets dry and insipid ; but where a man is 
conscious that what he is saying to-day in the air will 
be proclaimed on the housetop by the outrunning 
newspapers, he cannot but have larger thought, and 
a larger sympathy, and a larger influence. But the 
newspaper is the auxiliary, not the leader. Nor can 
science make any pretension to take the place of the 
preacher. We are greatly indebted to it. Science, 
if it be ripe and right, is the commentary on God's 
Old Testament of the natural world, and it may be 
and will be an adjutant, will clear up many doubts, 
will destroy many dogmas — thank God — and in 



ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 79 

various ways will make itself useful. It never will 
be that which the human soul needs in its aspira- 
rations and longings, temptations, and distresses, 
and troubles, in youth, in mid-life, or in old age, 
in happiness or in prosperity, in adversity and 
sorrow, in the prison or in the mountains of the 
refugee. Science cannot come to bring comfort as 
well as light to men ; it is only religion that brings 
hope and light and life and immortality. Therefore, 
science is a cane, religion is the man that walks 
with it and helps himself along the rough road of 
life. 

Motive for Entering the Ministry, 

Now, because of its nobleness, the office of a 
preacher must not be sought unworthily. Once it 
was not so tempting an office. When the apostles 
died the death daily, when they were accounted as 
the off-scouring of all things, there were not then 
many candidates for the ministry ; but the office has 
become through the ages a foremost office, and it 
has brought dignity and immunities and honours 
to its support. Now a support for this world is a 
very good thing. As long as a man is in the flesh, 
he has got to consider the laws of the flesh, he must 
eat and he must drink, and he must wear respect- 
able clothing, he must have a dwelling-place, and, 
therefore, it is not an improper thing for a man 
that is going to be a preacher to have some con- 
sideration of his support ; but he had better not go 
into the business of preaching on that ground. The 
very moment that he looks at this business as a 
means of support, that very moment he should 
know that he is disqualified from entering it at all. 
Nor because it is a respectable profession should a 
man enter it ; there is no heart in such a minister as 
that ; it is empty, it is worse than empty, it is the 
seven other evil spirits that, cast out, come back 



80 ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 

again, and his estate is worse than it was in the 
beginning. The idea of physical support and the 
idea of respectability in the community, these are 
not things to be despised in themselves, but as the 
motive power in the choice of a profession they are 
simply contemptible, and there is nothing more 
contemptible than them, except the man that acts 
under them. It is not the place for ambition, for 
self-seeking, or the mild and unconscious way of 
developing man's gifts to the admiration of his 
fellow-men. A true call to the sacred ministry is 
the voice of God in you speaking through your 
highest and noblest faculties. Any other considera- 
tion than that is not a call of God, and there are 
very many called, but few are chosen. There are 
many men that are called to the ministry, they 
think; but, as a wise old Methodist once said, when 
God calls a man to preach He always calls folks to 
come and hear him. 

The One Thing Needful. 

"Well, now, what is the genesis of the substantial 
force in a right-minded and effectual preacher ? I 
do not mean what are his external advantages, that 
he has a comely presence, that he has a fluent voice, 
that he has a ready and active imagination, that he 
has the power of utterance of deep emotions — all 
these things are right ; but I am looking for some- 
thing back of all this — what is it that should con- 
stitute in the man the substantial element by which 
he shall live a preacher's life? I hold it is 
love to God and love to man. Now, in regard 
to this, it is not love to God as the Creator, 
Bountiful Benefactor, the Wise, the Architect 
— all of these things are sublime, and are true, 
and are not out of the purview of a thoughtful 
man at any time ; but that is not the view of 
God that makes a preacher ; it is God as translated 



ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 81 

in human conditions by the Lord Jesus Christ. It 
is the seeing of God through Jesus, that it is that 
gives the love, not alone piquancy, but personality 
and definiteness and enthusiasm. I, too, admire God 
in the dewy morning, but I do not believe any sinner- 
was ever converted by that. I see God in singing 
birds, and in caravans and crowds ; I see God on 
the tempestuous sea — or I would if I were on deck ; 
I would everywhere. All nature is a revelation of 
God, but it is as He exists in the person of Jesus 
Christ — He is my God ! So much so that if I had 
no other God than that which Nature exhibits I 
w T ould throw off the garment of the pulpit very 
quickly, and it is nothing but that undying vision of 
God in loving, succouring, bearing in Himself the 
sins of men, with all helpfulness for those that lack 
help ; it is God as made known to me in Jesus 
Christ that I adore, and to all eternity, whether in 
heaven or hell, I will adore, my God and my Life ! 
Well, it is not simply Jesus Christ in a philosophical 
aspect as analysed, and still less Jesus Christ as 
harnessed into the various systems of theology. 
There are at least eighteen or nineteen distinct 
variations of the Atonement of Christ. I have been 
asked this morning : " Do you believe in the Atone- 
ment ? " Which ? I believe in mine ; I believe that 
my God has made known to me in Jesus Christ his 
atonement for the sins of the world, and that it 
inheres in the divine nature and overpours and fills 
time, and will fill all eternity. I believe that but for 
this redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ no man 
would ever rise higher than the vegetable or the 
animal, and that it is the inspiration of the world. 
He impletes the heart, the soul with himself, and 
He is all in all. I believe in Jesus Christ — that is 
the whole thing. Now I wish to read the Bible ; 
but I have not got it. 

The Chairman : There is a Bible on the premises. 

a 



82 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

Mr. Bee cher : Well, once in a while it is not 
bad to have it in the pulpit. (A Bible was then 
handed to Mr. Beecher.) 

Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus ; who, 
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal 
with God : but made himself of no reputation, and took upon 
him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men ; 
and, being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and 
became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. 
"Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a 
name which is above every name : that at the name of Jesus 
every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in 
earth, and things under the earth. 

"Well, now comes that for which I quote this — 

If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort 
of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and 
mercies, fulfil ye my joy, that ye be like-minded, having the 
same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be 
done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let 
each esteem other better than himself. — (Philippians ii. 1 — 3.) 

"Let this mind be in you which was in Christ 
Jesus," who, being the highest, so that He could 
justly compare Himself with God, brought Himself 
down to the very bottoin of existence, and became 
the bond-slave to death itself. That is the mind 
that is in Christ Jesus, and if any man is to be a 
minister of Christ he is to bear in mind the mottoes 
that are sprinkled so abundantly through Christ's 
teaching, "If any man would be chief amongst you, 
let him be your servant." And right alongside of 
the solemn scene of the Last Supper is also that 
other scene where Christ washed His disciples' feet. 
The introduction to that is wonderful to me. After 
supper, knowing that He had come from God and 
would return to God — that is to say, in the flush 
and flash of a consciousness of His whole Godhead 
which was obscured in many places and instances— 
yet here it came back to Him, as it were, and the 



ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 83 

heavens opened upon Him — and in the grandeur of 
His consciousness of His elevation and nobility 
what did He do ? He took a basin of water, and a 
towel, as a symbol, and washed his disciples' feet, 
and said to them, "If I, your Lord and Master, 
have done these thing to you, you ought to do them 
to one another.'' That is the fulfilment or the com- 
mentary upon this declaration in Philippians ii. 5 — 
that he that would be chief among you, he must 
be your slave. Now, when a man has a call to the 
ministry, he is to preach Christ and to understand 
Christ. Pie may understand a good many things 
out of books, he may understand a great many 
things out of systems, he may help himself into per- 
plexities of experience, but, after all, the man that 
is the true preacher learns by the indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost what was the nature of that love which 
led Christ Jesus to empty Himself, and to go down 
to the bottom as it were, to the feet of the universe, 
that when He lifted Himself up He should carry 
everything with Him. It is not enough, then, that 
you simply have an admiration of G-od, and an 
admiration of Jesus Christ, and an approbation of 
Him, but you must be Christs yourselves according 
to the measure of your being. When the mother 
of Zebedee's children came to Christ saying to Him, 
" Lord, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom, 
grant that these my two sons may sit, one on Thy 
right hand and the other on Thy left " — make one 
of them Secretary of State and the other of the 
Treasury — and Christ says to them, in an awfully 
solemn simplicity, " Can ye drink of the cup that I 
shall drink, and be baptized with the baptism that 
I shall be baptized withal?" the innocent fellows, 
shallow-pated, said, " Yea, Lord." But I tell you 
that the man that is to come into Christ's spirit 
and be able to understand Him is the man that 
imitates Him. I do not mean imitates Him by being 



84 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

pure from vices or imitates Him by being aspiring ; 
be puts himself in relation to Jesus Christ by the 
element of love, and then he puts himself into relation 
to his fellow-men by an imitation that we none of us 
ever do make, — I do not, you do not, no man ever 
does, — namely, laying down our life by keeping it, 
and putting it absolutely at the command of those 
outside of us that can be fructified and saved by our 
life. We ought to be in sympathy with men. You 
read in the Hebrews that Christ was a High Priest, 
and then that the High Priest was selected from 
among men, among other reasons because He should 
have compassion on the ignorant and on them that 
are out of the way. And so Christ is One that can 
have compassion on the ignorant and on those that 
are out of the way, and Christ's ministers must be 
those that can have compassion on the ignorant and 
on those that are out of the way. What is com- 
passion ? Is it living with them ? Oh ! no, not out- 
wardly, but it is having your heart and their heart in 
such conjunction as that they are to you as your own 
self is. Now, how many of us have that sympathy for 
our fellow-men ? How many could go down and live 
with the poor, if by that means we could lift the 
poor up? How many can go into the neglected 
quarters of this city and become ministers of Jesus 
Christ in verity by identifying themselves with any 
section or line of men, living among them, under- 
standing them, and giving the whole power and 
resources of love towards uplifting them ? It has 
been done. Oh, I love to hear good things of 
denominations that I do not believe in. I love a 
good thing wherever it is. When I read the history 
of the missions in Canada of the Jesuits in the early- 
days, I am melted to tears, I am rebuked. As a 
Protestant, I believe, of course, a great deal better 
than they do, but as a Christian they lived a great 
deal better life than I have been able to do, for they 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 85 

actually sacrificed civilisation and all social comforts, 
and went out among them, derided by the Indians 
themselves, persecuted, suffering and dying in their 
midst without a thought of recognition or any 
earthly reward, but because they had had in their 
hearts to live as Christ lived to them and to the 
whole world. Have you that spirit ? We talk 
about benevolence and give a shilling ! We talk 
about benevolence, and are kind and good-natured, 
but are you able to put the power of your whole 
being under the men round about you, and the law of 
sympathy is, the lower men are the more sympathy 
for them increases. Are you in that condition in 
which you can go down and crave to go yet lower, 
if there are any lower, as Paul said, that that 
which was lacking of the sufferings of Jesus Christ 
might be made up in his own body. I cannot read 
that history of Paul without rebuke upon rebuke, 
and rebuke upon rebuke, until I feel as though I ' 
hardly had claim to be a Christian and still less 
claim to be a Christian preacher of the Gospel. 
The first work, therefore, of him that means to be a 
preacher is to learn of God in regard to his own self 
and life, and to be an imitator and follower of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. I do not mean that every man 
should go among the people ; I do not mean that 
men should not take positions among the refined, 
but the spirit that lies behind their ministries should 
be a subtle and compliant spirit, by which they 
would be able to go down to the very bottom, as 
well as to ascend and fructify the top of life. We 
have got much to learn of lectureships, much of 
Greek and its construction, much, it may be, of 
Hebrew, much, it may be, of ecclesiastical history, 
much of didactic theology, and if discriminately 
learnt they are all useful — though theology, as a 
whole, must be taken as we eat fish — pinch the 
meat off and let the bones remain. "If this 



86 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

sentence is wisely constructed it is true, but if it 
is not it is not true." We need more than anything 
else, first to get ourselves exactly into the stand- 
point of Jesus Christ in that work of humbling Him- 
self in order to lift up the poor and the low and the 
despised. This should be the true ministerial force 
and method. We begin to preach to save men — not 
a technical salvation, not a dogmatic salvation, but 
a living, personal resurrection of their natures, and 
that, too, by your living example, and by the spirit 
of your teaching, and by the whole outflow of 
sympathy that ranks you alongside of Jesus Christ 
in His royal work. But oh ! when a man once has 
come into that, and while he is in it, there is 
nothing that creates such joy in this world as 
self-sacrifice. I remember very well when I was 
so poor that I could not take a letter out of the 
post-office for a week (postage then was 25 cents) ; 
so poor that I had absolutely nothing for weeks 
together — I do not mean of food, but nothing which 
belongs to the station in life in which I was born ; 
when I was a missionary among emigrants in 
the far West. I think I shall never see another 
such morning as that in which, under great dis- 
couragements, riding through the forests, there 
came to me such a vision of being with Christ, 
and of the certainty of reigning with Him, 
that all these deprivations — I felt as though I 
wished they were doubled ! I gloried in infirmity ! 
I felt, " My life is not here, my life is yonder ; it is 
hid with Christ in God, and I am going to it." Oh I 
it was an inspiration higher than any poet's, higher 
than any eloquence can depict — it was the mute 
soul-experience. We do' not go far enough in our 
self-denials ; we go just so far as to make them taste 
bitter, and not to make them taste good with the 
heroism and the triumph on the other side. Well 
now, when a man has in him the consciousness that 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 87 

this life is but the prelude — is but the morning 
star of existence, the sunrise of His might — when 
we believe that the Divine Spirit is diffused through 
all things in this world : God is everywhere, above, 
below, either side, impending, universal, constant, 
and continuous ; when we live in Him as men live 
in sunshine — when a man is in that state of mind, 
and all his thoughts are heavenward, or else earth- 
ward for the groanings of the captives that they may 
be delivered — when a man lives in that state and it 
becomes his necessary life, his joy and his enthu- 
siasm, such a life as that cannot be a barren one in 
the flesh. And out of that there may be very little 
rhetoric born, there may be very little of that which 
men call eloquence. I tell you that a mother's tear 
in the presence of a disobedient child is more 
eloquent than all the language that she could use. 
There is an eloquence of words, aud it is a just 
eloquence ; but the eloquence of a man's soul-filling* 
life — that is a power that cannot be simulated nor 
imitated in any way, and the Christian man who 
believes himself to have been born again of the 
Spirit of God, who believes that his life is in Jesus 
Christ, who hears Christ saying to him, " Hence- 
forth I call you not servants, but friends," who is 
going home as the years move on, bringing him 
nearer and nearer to his Father's house — oh ! if 
such a man cannot be influential and powerful as a 
preacher, what power is there on earth, even of 
miracle, that could make the rock break forth in 
streams out of such a heart as that ? 

The Place of Emotion. 

Now with that general unfolding I might, as is 
always said to be the right way, apply the sermon 
after it has been reasoned out, and I might apply it 
to every one of you and ask you, Do you want to be 



88 ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 

a preacher, knowing what it means, knowing what 
is the fountain of its power, knowing what its rela- 
tionship is to God — do you want to be a preacher, or 
do you want to sit on the right hand and on the left 
of the ascertained glory of the coming kingdom of 
Jesus Christ ? Do you want to be orthodox in order 
to be orthodox ? Do you want to be eloquent in 
order to have a certain power over men to your own 
edincation and admiration, or do you want to be a 
power like Christ's, whether you go down or whether 
you go up ? Do you want the enthusiasm of a 
ransomed soul persuading men to be ransomed? 
One of the most affecting and illustrative stories that 
I ever recollect was that of a missionary to the slaves 
in the early slavery of Cuba, where cruelties were 
unmatched and immeasurable. He was a Moravian. 
He went out to preach to the slaves. He found them 
coming back at evening outworn. The Moravian 
was a white man, and the master was a white man, 
and he could make no impression on them at all. 
At last he sold himself to the plantation, that he 
might be permitted to go out with the slaves afield, 
and let them see that he would suffer with them — 
that he thought of them, would live with them and 
be like them, a slave, that he might rescue them 
from eternal slavery. That is laying a man's life 
down. It is a great deal more powerful to lay down 
your life by living it than it is to lay it down by-and- 
by by giving it up ; and every man ought to have 
this high thought and enthusiasm for the work of a 
Gospel preacher before he enters into it. Well, 
now, you will say, of course, do you mean a man is 
to go before every audience with a great enthusiastic 
-outburst of emotion? No; I do not say that. I 
say that the minister, while this glowing zeal and 
love is at the bottom of everything else, and is the 
motive-power of everything else, must adapt himself 
to the levels of the society in which he is moving. 



ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 89 

There are some things that belong to the levels of 
all men alike, but then there are some other things 
that belong to different levels, and to certain lines of 
people. I think that a man going into the midst of 
an intelligent audience does not need to preach in 
the same way that he would if he were going out 
into the street in the midst of a dragonnade, or 
among poor and ignorant men. The lower down 
you go in humanity, the more need there is of emo- 
tion in preaching ; but as you go up you "Come to a 
line of people who are not injured by suitable emo- 
tion ; but it must be of a more refined kind. They 
demand something more than emotion. There 
is no reason why you should not feed them. And 
there be many that go up still higher. They are 
not only emotive and intelligent, but refined. There 
is a development of the element of beauty in their 
life, and thought, and feeling. The minister ought 
to preach the Gospel in the language in which these 
folks are born. There is no reason why a man 
should not preach to the philosophical in one way, 
preach to the lawyers in the Temple as if they 
understood higher themes. I don't mean by that 
that there is one Gospel for the bottom and another 
for the middle and another for the top, but that the 
method by which you bring to the minds of men, 
the doors through which you can enter to their 
moral conscience, are different. The unchangeable 
elements, love to God and love to man, require no 
speculative emotive outpouring, but adaptation 
comes in. Now carry this a little further, for some 
of you will feel discouraged and say, " Well, what 
are we going to do, we cannot preach in that way 
because our minds are slow and very cautious, and 
we cannot think on our feet, and we have got to 
write." Well, write this, and take the consequences. 
If you do good in that way do it, and do not 
grumble if you do not do as much good as you 



90 ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 

would if you had a more mobile temperament. ''Ah ! 
but," say some men, "this enthusiasm of love — 
well, we believe in general benevolence, but somehow 
or other we are rather cold and speculative, and 
what shall we do in the pulpit ? " Well, you have 
no business to be in the pulpit. Your business is to 
go out. "Oh!" say some, "we have no such 
power and influence as a great many men have." 
That is so. One star differs from another in mag- 
nitude and in glory, and a part of your willingness 
is to be what you are and where you are as to your 
stature, and to do the good that belongs to your 
personality. I should like to be a good deal more 
learned than I am. It is not likely I shall be, and I 
have got to content myself with what I have got. 
I have aspiration in every direction, but when it 
comes home to the limitation of my nature I must 
give in. I have been baptized, I believe, by the 
Holy Ghost with a willingness to be just what I 
am — neither more nor less for Christ's sake and for 
man's sake. Do not then cut out your work. Do 
not desire to go into the ministry for the sake of 
having a high place. Go to the wilderness if there 
you have adaptation ; go among the poor or the 
humble if there you find your sphere of labour most 
active, most important, and useful. Wherever you 
are, go where Christ sends you, and take His place 
and carry His spirit, and be thankful that whatever 
comes of you in this life following Christ leads but 
to one place, and that is the gate of welcome. 

The Need of " a Belief." 

Now a word or two more. "You would ask me, 
" Do not you think that it will be necessary, if we 
are to preach, that we should be orthodox ? " I 
should like to see a report taken here of what 
orthodoxy is ; I do not believe that there would be 



ADDEESS TO STUDENTS, 



91 



two of you that would agree, and it comes back to 
the old familiar saw, "Orthodoxy is my doxy and 
heterodoxy is your doxy." " But ought not a man 
to have some distinct system in his own mind? " I 
think he ought. I am not here to dispossess men of 
intelligence and of rectitude, of the idea that beliefs 
are unimportant. Every man ought to have a 
system. He ought to have the high Calvinist view, 
although it is measured the other way, I think. 
He ought to have the High Church view in all the 
different denominations, and the Low Church view, 
or any of them. Pick out any of them, but see to it 
that you get the heart right, for the heart is that 
element that, when it exists in reality and power, 
corrects all theology practically. It certainly is the 
case that it is the man and his life and his disposi- 
tion that is God's theology in the ministry. And if 
to this you have added corrected intellectual ideas, 
frameworks and systems, as every thinking man 
will and must for himself, why, all the better, but I 
tell you that heterodoxy with a right heart under it 
is better than orthodoxy with a malign heart under 
it. Take the apostolic sieve. Paul did not object 
to eloquence, nor to learning, nor to wisdom in any 
form, but he sifted them all out, and kept saying to 
one and another and another, " Though I have the 
tongues of men and angels and have not love, I am 
nothing." Sift out that and sift out that. You 
might sift out two-thirds of all the glory among 
men, and if love is left behind you are rich ; and you 
might have all these things, and if love is left out 
they are no profit to you whatever. I am not, 
therefore, for undenomination arising men. I believe 
in sects. I believe that the Baptists ought to be 
Baptists simply because they think so, and as a 
man thinketh so is he. I think that the Calvinist 
that is genuinely misled into that ought to stand by 
his guns. I think that the Presbyterian Church 



92 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

ought to be Presbyterian, and the Methodist 
Church ought to be Methodist, and the Episcopal 
Church ought to be Episcopal, and the Congrega- 
tionalist ought to be Congregational ; they, of all 
men in the world, have reason to be proud of their 
Congregationalism and to stand by it. But let not 
Ephraim vex Judah, let not one mash against the 
other; love men in that respect. There is one 
thing that belongs to them altogether — love with a 
pure heart fervently, and I will trust any misleading 
doctrine or any ordinance or any worship if it stands 
with the burning bush of love showing that the Lord 
God Almighty is present within. 

" Keep Your Personality. " 

Keep your personality. Of course you cannot 
when you are studying theology. The baby has got 
no personality, he is under the nurse, under the 
mother — it is very well it is so. If a strong man is 
teaching theology you will be of his theological 
school, unless you have an inordinate combativeness ; 
and all that is very well ; I have nothing to say 
about that ; but as you go forward into life and try 
on the things that have been taught you by the only 
true practical test, namely, the effects you produce 
by them upon the men you are preaching to, and 
the use you can make of them ; by-and-by you will 
feel that you are changing this, modifying that, 
re-stating that. Well, do not be afraid to follow 
your best thoughts, but not in a hurry ; try them on 
year by year, little by little ; not only try them on, 
but remember that at last when you get that which 
; gives you liberty there is presumption that for you 
you have struck the true view and the true system. 
Well, say men, can a man have a private system of 
his own ? Ah ! I never was a believer in the unity 
of theology, in the unity of thought ; men are not 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 93 

big enough to take in the whole of God's truth ; 
there is only a little of it that comes in through one 
particular form and organisation. That man is true 
to himself, and so is true to the higher realm of 
God's truth, for it takes 500 men to make a man 
that is odd all round, and even all round. If you 
have dry, metaphysical minds, do not be afraid to use 
them, or if you have the analytical and logical mind,, 
well, use that, only all the time keep the cauldron 
simmering with the fire of love under it ; and if you 
have a practical mind do not mourn that you have 
not got an illuminative one ; and if you have got an 
imaginative mind, even to the borders of Sweden- 
borgianism, why, stick to it. For you it is as much 
better as for a bird wings are better than arms. Do 
not be afraid of maintaining your own personality, 
because - God has some things to say to mankind 
through persons that differ from all round about 
them, that ought to be said and that can't be said 
by anybody but such a man. But when you have 
this personality in you do not undertake to raise a 
sect. Use it for yourself as the most productive 
instrument that you have for ministering, but do 
not go about saying to everybody else : " You are 
just as far from the truth as you are distant from 
my way of thinking." There are a great many men 
in this world that measure all by the diameter of 
their own minds, and if a man does not think as they 
do, concatenately everything, one right after the 
other, they scoff at him, " He may be useful in a 
degree, but he is off the track." No man is off the 
track that is on Jesus Christ. 

Temptations of the Pulpit. 

Well, beware, my dear young friends, of the pecu- 
liar temptations of the pulpit. In the first place, 
beware of the love of praise. The young minister 



94 ADDBESS TO STUDENTS. 

is peculiarly in danger. We all love praise, but 
praise should follow us and never precede us. If 
you have done right and men like it, then it comes 
under the category of things that are of "good 
report," which we are commanded to ponder and to 
think upon ; but see to it that your aspirations are 
not for praise, but for the welfare of man and the 
glory of God, and then if praise comes, well and 
good ; but remember you are going into the midst 
of fire with inflammable garments on you, and 
there is nothing that weakens a man so quickly and 
is so dangerous to him as measuring everything by 
its relation to its popularity and to his success in 
life. It is dangerous even to damnableness ! And 
then he, the man, has his own church to try to 
spoil him. Of course, God raises up deacons by 
whom men are held in sometimes. Oftentimes in 
this world a thorn in the flesh is one thorn for a 
man's crown by-and-by ; but where there is one 
deacon that is a vexatious intruder on your indi- 
vidual liberty, there are a hundred old women or 
young women that are praising you and flattering 
you, saying kind things to you, and seeking to soften 
you. I believe in softness in the heart ; but I do 
not believe in having a man's head soft. That is 
one of the things you must watch against. 



"Do Not Be in a Hurry" 

Another thing is, do not be in a hurry. Do not 
think that because you have preached five years in 
one place, and see no good, that, therefore, there is 
no good. It is very likely that the very element 
that will make your work productive is that trouble 
that shall come to you in your cradle, or come to you 
in the bitter bereavement of your life. The persim- 
mon is a fruit that, while it is yet green, is bitter 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 95 

and puckery to the last degree ; but when once it 
has been frosted, it is one of the sweetest of all 
the fruits ; and there are a great many seeds — it is 
not until the winter has dissolved in them the glue 
that they can open their shell and let out the root of 
the plumule. And there are many men that are not 
fit to be preachers until they have gone through the 
path of suffering and sorrow. Your mortification 
and ill-success, instead of dissuading you from the 
Gospel ministry, should lead you to say to yourself : 
" I am being baptized with the baptism wherewith He 
was baptized," and hold on, work on ! The day is 
short ; do not be troubled. But oh, my young 
brethren, my heart yearns for you when I look out 
and see into what varied experience you are going 
and what the work has been in this world. I have 
a father's feeling for his sons toward you, and I com- 
mit you to the care of Him who cared for me, Him 
who loves you and me ; and I say to you, whatever 
chequered way your life may have in it, there is one 
day that will not delay, and that will surely come, 
when you shall go into the presence of your 
Father and my Father, and there shall come from 
the multitudes of heaven greeting voices saying to 
you : . " But for you I had not known Christ ; " glory 
and immortality shining from their faces, and 
reckoning you their high priest under the great 
High Priest. Oh ! one hour in heaven will be worth 
a whole century upon earth, and the commendation 
of God will be to you music that will never end, 
that will roll on for ever and ever. You have entered, 
or will soon enter, the most glorious career, if you 
are fit for it, that can be open to men. Do not be 
tempted by any collateral business, do not be 
tempted by any praise, do not be tempted by any 
pride, do not be tempted by any discouragement ; 
hold on and work to the end, and then shall come 
the great and glorious outpouring, and one hour in 



96 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

heaven will be worth ten thousand years of suffering 
upon earth. 

Answees to Questions. 

I stand now for any practical questions that may 
be asked. Allow me to say that while this meeting 
is for the communion of candidates for the ministry, 
the matter of questioning does not confine itself to 
them, and any that are in the ministry, and that 
have difficulties of a practical or personal kind upon 
which I can throw any light, or about which I can 
give any solution, may be perfectly free to propose 
any questions, and I will promise you one thing, that 
if I can't answer them I will tell you so. 

A Cleegyman : May I beg to ash one question ? I have 
simply to say how very grateful ive should be if, as many 
of us are unable to hear Mr. Beecher on Sunday morn- 
ing, he could preach anywhere within our reach on 
Sunday evening ? 

Mr. Beechee : I will be perfectly willing t3 
preach in St. Paul's or at Westminster. 

I mean in any chapel in London ? 

Mr. Beechee : I am afraid that I shall be obliged 
to carry on my original purpose in that regard. I 
have been preaching in the chapels of London for 
some time, and I should like to try some of the 
other buildings. 

Mr. : The question I luish to ash is whether in order 

to avoid slovenliness in the preparation of sermons it 
would not be well for us to write a good deal in the 
earlier years ? 

Mr. Beechee : Yes, a great many cannot succeed 
without doing it. It is a curb, and at the same time 
a kind of a midwife too. There are a great many 
men's sermons that never would be born if they 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 97 

were born on their standing feet. Their nature is 
cautious and is slow and they are timorous, and the' 
presence of an audience abashes them and the 
whole thing evaporates. In my own case it is just 
the reverse of that. An audience always puts me in 
possession of everything I have got ; but there are- 
a great many people that have not that peculiar dis- 
position, and I think that in the earlier part of a 
man's ministry, if he is ever so qualified, it is a good 
thing to constrain a man's thoughts into a just meed 
of preparation and get the conception of a well- 
organised sermon ; but after that is acquired, the 
larger the liberty is the more fruitful a man will be.' 
in the work. 

Mr. ■ : Dear Sir, you have told us that our life as 

ministers must be a sacrifice, that we must be the ser- 
vants of all men ; you have told us, also, ive must be 
inspired by love to God to win men ; you have told us 
that our preaching must be logical and full of power. 
I want to know how we are to get this ; that is the great, 
point, it seems to me, not to know what is the power, but' 
how to get the power. We find this exemplified in the- 
cases of George Whitfield and John Wesley, and some- 
other such men. I want to know this morning how to- 
get that power. 

Mr. Beecher : I will answer that. Do not be- 
discouraged because, being an apprentice, you are^ 
not a journeyman. There is the element of an art. 
as well as of a profession, and every young preacher 
— there may be one exception in ten thousand — but: 
ordinarily the young preacher has got to learn his; 
business, and he has got to creep before he can 
walk, and walk before he can run. When you 
are beginning to preach, do not be discouraged 
because you do not come up to your own 
ideal ; do not be discouraged because after a 
year you look back on your ministry and see that 



98 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

it is a very imperfect and wretched one, and does 
not answer your ambition at all. That is one of the 
best symptoms possible for a }^oung man to have. 
Do not think that you have preached everything 
that you are going to preach because you put a big 
sermon finally as the result of a great deal of work 
into a sermon or a series of them. Be humble, and 
go on to do the best you can to-day and the best 
you can next time, and the horizon will open wider 
and wider. I laboured under great disadvantages in 
coming into the Christian ministry. My father was 
a very eminent theologian and preacher, and that is 
enough to beat the head in of any son of his that 
comes after him ; because we are all measured by 
the reputation of the father. I went off out of the 
city. I went out into the country. I really ex- 
pected to live and die in Indiana, and it is in my 
heart to do it yet — I love the State. I went into 
the woods, and on the prairies, and everywhere. I 
had very little to say. I had gone through the whole 
circle of debate and theology, and so on. I had had 
more than enough of it. I had had a revelation of 
the nature of Christ, and at first it was no more 
than a start to me. It grew, however, more and 
more, but it was not until I had been preaching 
about four or five years that I had a horizon that 
extended around the whole circle. I preached in 
disquietude and in almost discouragement during 
that time, but at last I came to that feeling — "I 
do believe that I shall now be a preacher." 
I began to see how I could do the things 
by preaching that I set out to do, and it was 
a blessed finding out, too. I think it was Cor- 
reggio who, when he made his first and only visit to 
Rome, having been a painter in his own province, 
and comparatively unknown, went to see the works 
of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Eaffaelle. All that 
he said as he looked round on them was : " I, too, 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 99 

am a painter." He did not say he was equal to 
them, hut he saw in looking at their works that 
he had got hold of the element, and that he was 
a painter. I remember the day when I said I was 
a preacher ; I had with tears and sorrow laboured 
to do something that would startle men. I sat 
down and took the Book of Acts, and analysed 
it to see what it was that enabled the Apostles to 
produce such effects. I got an idea — it was a very 
imperfect one — that has corrected since, but I got 
an idea about it, and I said: "Now, I will construct, on 
these lines, not a repetition of this sermon, but I will 
make a sermon that shall be adapted to the state, 
the want, and feeling of such communities as there 
are here." I knocked over thirteen men with that 
sermon. I never had had a fish-bite before, and the 
moment that I came home I said, "Oh, I have got 
it ! I have got it ! I know now how it is going to be 
done." Well, I tried it again the next time, and I 
failed totally, and I had more tumbles down than I 
had standings up, but through poor sermons and 
good sermons I pressed forward until I got to the 
degree of fluency that I have attained. And I want 
you to understand one thing — I do not consider 
myself a good preacher. As God is my Judge my 
sermons are continually condemning me, not in the 
mere matter of scope and thought, but in the soul 
qualities. I ought to live better and be better to 
enable me to make sermons that shall be worthy of 
my Master, Jesus Christ. Do not be discouraged 
because you make poor work of preaching at first. 
Go on ! 

Mr. : I should like to ask a question concerning the 

manner in which the esteemed lecturer would encourage 
young ministers in enforcing passages of Scripture that 
point to retribution, I ask this because those who have 
been very successful ministers in the past — such as 
Wesley, Whitfield, Bichard Baxter, and men of that 



100 ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 

class — very largely use such passages, giving them the 
popular interpretation, containing the elements of fear. 
1 forget the reply once given by the esteemed lecturer to 
a similar question put to him by some students at a 
university. 

Mr. Beecher : If a man believes in the conscious 
torment of men, eternal, conscious torment in hell, 
if he ever smiles, if he ever gets married, if he ever 
goes into convivial company with jest and joke, he 
is a monster. [A Voice : "It is according to the 
Bible."] I have this to say, that so far as my own 
personal belief is concerned, I work by hope and 
love, and inspire, as far as I can, these as the work- 
ing forces in my people, and not fear — except in 
those words of fear that spring from love— filial fear, 
and so on ; but as regards the future, I believe that 
Christ taught simply this : that moral character 
went on from this life into the other, bearing the 
same general tendencies with which men live here. 
In regard to the doctrine of hell as taught by the 
barbaric theologies of the Middle Ages, and as 
taught by very many of the barbaric denominations 
yet, I saj 7 that it is not according to the mind nor 
will of the New Testament. But I do believe our 
Lord taught us that living selfishly and corruptly 
here would bear such fruits in the life to come as to 
make it the interest of every man to live righteously 
and rightly. The doctrine preached by sincere, 
gentle-minded men wins my respect for them ; it is 
for the raucous, red-mouthed men that are preach- 
ing hell-fire and damnation, and going home to 
drink their wine and eat their bread-and-meat — 
it is for them that I have no allowance — because 
this doctrine is everything — it is everything if 
it be true, and the world ought to be in tears, 
and pleasure ought to be unknown under such 
circumstances. 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 101 

Mr. : What is your idea as to the frequency with 

which a minister should make pastoral visits, and what 
effects are those visits likely to have upon his ministry ? 

Mr. Beecher : I hold that a man that is devoted 
to preaching mnst take Paul's advice with regard to 
serving tables. He says : " I was called to preach 
the Gospel." and that he could not " serve tables." 
Now I hold that the power of man is limited. He 
has only got so much vitality in his brain. If he 
spends that drop by drop all through the week he 
won't have it in any concentrated form on Sunday. 
And yet there are very many communities where 
the average of knowledge is so low that the man as 
a pastor must sacrifice himself as a preacher, and 
must go round from house to house, but you cannot 
in one case in ten thousand unite the two. It 
depends, no doubt, partly on your gifts and partly 
on the condition of the community in which you are 
living. There is a vast amount opened up in that 
question. The adaptation of the man in the 
ministry to various functions must determine the 
selection from those functions of such as are best 
suited to bring out his whole force, and that will 
best suit the community of which he is meet to be 
the leader and pastor. There is a liberty of selec- 

ion, but you cannot have everything and have it all 
the time. 

Mr. : May I ask Mr. Beecher a question ? Is it not 

in part from pastoral visitation that a clergyman or 
minister is most likely to attain that warmth of love which 
he has so eloquently impressed upon us ? Is it not in 
seeing the people in their own homes and knowing their 
lives that our sympathy with them is most likely to be 
called out ? 

Mr. Beecher : Every man will determine that 
for himself. For myself I do not need it. I do not 
need to go out into my congregation and see them 



102 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

individually in order to get sympathy and strong 
feeling. I have too much feeling, anyhow too strong, 
and I therefore am very glad not to do some of 
those things ; but if a man is relatively feeble in the 
development of emotion, and needs that quickening, 
he certainly will improve himself b} 7 going amongst 
his flock. 

Mr. ■ : Will Mr. Beecher kindly give us his opinion as 

to the practice of reading sermons in the pulpit ? 

Mr. Beecher : It depends very much on two 
things — what the sermon is, and what the fellow is 
that reads it. 1 have heard sermons read that were 
a great deal more vital and effective than what are 
called extemporaneous sermons, and, on the other 
hand, I have heard the other thing exactly. 

Mr. : Would Mr. Beecher kindly give us his opinion 

regarding the length of our sermons 9 

Mr. Beecher : As long as your people want to 
hear you, so long you may be at liberty to extend 
your sermon, but when folks begin to gape and look 
at their watches, and look round at the door, and 
children get fretful, that man's a fool that goes on 
with his sermon. 

Mr. : Would Mr. Beecher favour us with his own 

method of preparing for the pulpit? 

Mr. Beecher : I am afraid that I should ruin, 
men. My whole life is a general preparation. Every- 
thing I read, everything I think, all the time— 
whether it is secular, philosophic, metaphj^sic, 
scientific — it all of it goes into the atmosphere with 
me, and then when the time comes for me to do 
anything — I do not know why it should be so, except 
that I am of that temperament — it crystallises, and 
very suddenly too, and so much of it as I am going 
to use for that distinct time comes right up before 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 103 

my mind in full form, and I sketch it down and rely 
upon my facility, through long experience, to give 
utterance and full development to it after I come 
before an audience. There is nothing in this world 
that is such a stimulus to me as an audience ; it 
wakes up the power of thinking and wakes up the 
power of imagination in me, and I should say it 
would be a great blessing if you were just so ; but it 
is not worth your while to try it until after you have 
practised alone a little while. 

Mr. ; May I ask Mr. Beecher how far he would 

advise young ministers to foster work on behalf of foreign 
missions in their churches ? 

Mr. Beecher : Well, I believe in foreign missions,. 
I believe that they have their best results, however,, 
at home. The old musket was far more effectual at 
the butt than it was at the muzzle, and the kick- 
back of the education which leads us to go out into 
all the world to preach the Gospel elevates the 
standard of faith and the standard of devotion in 
our home churches ; and I think that our home 
churches are more profited than the heathen ones, 
although they are helped. 

Mr. : Would Mr. Beecher give us his opinion as to 

the personality of the Holy Spirit ; toe have not heard 
much in Mr. Beecher s sermons with reference to this 
question, and we should like to know what his views are 
upon Ihe subject ? 

Mr. Beecher : Allow me to say first, I accept 
the doctrine of the Trinity as it has been held by the 
Evangelical orthodox church in every age. Not 
because I understand it. I am miserably ignorant of 
the organic condition of God. I only see through a 
glass darkly : I shall see Him as He is when I go 
into the other world. Now I believe that there is a 
Person, God the Father ; and a separate Person and 



104 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

Will, God the Son, Jesus ; and that there is the 
Holy Spirit, separate as either of the others; hut 
what is their mode of getting along together I do 
not know. I think it is perfectly safe for any man 
to send petitions or thoughts to either of them, and 
that there will be no jealousy between them, that 
whoever prays to the Father prays to all three, who- 
ever prays to the Son prays to the Father and the 
Spirit, whoever prays to the Spirit prays to the 
Father and the Son. 

The Chairman : You will remember, I am sure, dear friends, 
that this is a Conference and not an Inquisition. 

Mr. Beecher : Well, I begin just to wake up now. I am 
not afraid of the whole of you. I cannot answer one half of 
the questions you could put. All I have got to say is, I would 
like to see you come and stand here and let me put questions to 

.you. 

Vote of Thanhs. 

The Chairman : I think we must now bring this interesting 
■meeting to a close. When Mr. Beecher returns to this country 
-we shall be able to continue the interrogations. I have no doubt 
.the students have arranged amongst themselves as to some way 
in which they will recognise Mr. Beecher's great services to us 
■all this morning. Mr. Anstey: I feel it a very great privilege 
to have been asked, on your behalf, to propose a resolution ex- 
pressing our sincere gratitude to Mr. Beecher for meeting us 
liere to-day and delivering to us the address and other words of 
• council and sympathy which we have just listened to from him. 
As students for the ministry, we are looking forward with eager 
interest to a diligent and life-long study of Mr. Beecher's writ- 
ings, and I feel that what we have seen and heard of him in the 
City Temple this morning will throw an especial light on his 
.written words, and will help all of U8 from them for many years 
'to corne to draw additional help and inspiration. I will only 
further say I have very great pleasure in proposing that the best 
thanks of this meeting be tendered to Mr. Beecher for the 
address with which he has favoured us this morning. This 
was seconded by another student, who said : Dr. Parker, Ladies, 
and Gentlemen, — It is with great pleasure than I second this 
vote of thanks proposed by Mr. Anstey on behalf of the students 
generally, and on behalf ot Begent's-park College in particular. 
I am sure our deepest thanks are given this morning to Mr. 



ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 105 

Beecher for so kindly meeting with us, and speaking to us. It 
■will be a morning long memorable in our lives, whether our 
lives be long or short. Mr. Beecher's swords to us this morning 
— the words being, I think, the crystallisation of his whole life, 
giving us his opinion and his advice — seemed to me all the time 
to be revelations, each one of which we shall remember. Mr. 
Beecher's kindness, then, in speaking to us this morning is an 
inspiration for each one that we shall never forget. It is with 
very great pleasure that I second this vote of thanks. 

A Message from Nonvicli. 

Mr. Horder : May I interpose one word ? In your address, 
sir, you spoke of the cloudy beginnings of this week, and I wish 
to bear testimony to the brightness of its ending. In common 
with a considerable number in this building, this morning I have 
come up from Norwich on purpose to hear Mr. Beecher. Some 
of us were up between five and six this morning in order to get 
here, and I may say it will be no small thing that will take men, 
after a hard week's work, out of bed at five in the morning ; and 
we are here not only to listen to the wonderful address that we 
liave heard, but to express our deep admiration and thankful- 
ness to Mr. Beecher for his magnificent services to the ministry 
of the world in the days that are past. I wish just to assure 
Mr. Beecher that in the meetings of the Congregational Union 
which have just closed the resolution of deep regret at his 
absence was carried with almost perfect unanimity. There 
were only three hands held up against it in the large assembly, 
whilst every mention of his name was received with most en- 
thusiastic applause. I wish further to say that, through con- 
versation with a large number of ministers attending these 
meetings, we heard on all hands of the love, admiration, and 
thankfulness which filled their hearts to him for his services, 
through literature, in the past. ; and perhaps I may add this, that 
I suppose our feeling is that Mr. Beecher's words find us in the 
deepest place in our hearts. He has the singular and wonder- 
fal power of commending the Gospel to our consciences as in 
the sight of God, and I am sure he will go back to his own 
country with the prayers and most loving wishes, not only of 
the students, but of the vast majority of ministers in this 
country. 

The resolution was carried by acclamation. The Chairman : 
Are there any hands to the contrary ? The three are not here. 

Br. Parker's Statement. 
The Chairman: Before parting, I should like, if you will 
allow me, to make a concluding statement. I loo ed forward 



106 ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 

to Mr. Beeclier's visit to this country not without anxiety, but 
with great hopefulness and joy. Men may differ even from Mr. 
Beecher, so curiously constituted is human nature. No strange 
thing has happened because men have ventured to differ in 
opinion from Mr. Beecher, or have taken different views of 
things from those which Mr. Beecher has been led to adopt. I 
do not stand here pretending to have reached all Mr. Beecher's 
conclusions. I believe that some of them are open to revision, 
and that all of thern ought to receive our most anxious con- 
sideration. Let there be no mistake about this matter. Because 
a minister preaches for you or for me it does not folio w that the 
man for whom he preaches accepts all his philosophy, science, 
theology, and the like, but it does mean that there is a general, 
fraternal, substantial agreement between the two hearts. I 
would not allow any man to stand in my pulpit from whom I 
differed vitally. I do not hold the pulpit as a personal trust. 
I hold it in the name of others, in the interests of others, 
for the sake of the whole unseen, ever- corning, infinite kingdom 
of God the Son. That being the case, I am anxious as to the 
doctrine that is preached from my pulpit ; and, being so, I have 
looked into Mr. Beecher's theology in all the utterances to which 
I have had the pleasure of listening, and I am bound to say that, 
though we could not in all cases repeat the same words, though 
we may even assume a directly controversial attitude to one 
another at more points than one, yet as to the orthodoxy of his 
heart I have no doubt. I do not know that Mr. Beecher would 
resent the suggestion that he is not a theologian. He is a poet, 
he has an endless vocabulary, he has a resplendent, fertile, all 
but inexhaustible imagination, and I have no doubt that if we 
could have continued the inquisition into the holier places of his 
life we should have found that in many an instance he has sub- 
mitted to the discipline of self-correction. We do not look for 
infallibility in our pastors, teachers, guides. We take the course 
which Mr. Beecher has now so wisely and graciously pointed 
out. We begin where we can, we proceed slowly ; we are sure, 
absolutely sure, of one, two, three or more points, and from 
these points of certainty we advance as opportunity may enable 
us, or as Providence may indicate, to the higher places and more 
distant horizons. If, therefore, it be understood that there is 
no pope in Protestantism, that there is no infallibility in our 
conception of church life ; if it be understood that we are 
fellow-students, fellow-servants, some oldei, some wiser than the 
rest, I can see how, amid great diversity of conception and 
expression, there may be vital and affectionate unity. Of one 
thing I grow more assured : we shall never find unity in opinion, 
we shall never find the consolidation of the church in its pure 
intellection ; we must get into the heart, into the highest 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. 107 

thought, into the deepest emotion, and there we shall find 
brotherhood, mutual understanding, living and beneficent 
sympathy. When Mr. Beecher came to this country he 
was not hailed with admiration only — admiration never could 
have stood the strain to which Mr. Beecher has been sub- 
jected on this side of the water. Men do not do much for 
mere admiration ; beneath the admiration there is something 
worthier. How can we account for all classes of the community 
being interested in his coming ? How can we account for the 
throngs that gathered, not in the churches only, but that stood 
outside the churches, in long files and rows, beaming upon him, 
putting out hands to shake his hand, asking for the favour of 
a grip of his palm ? All this has a deeper meaning than the 
word "admiration" covers. We are indebted to Mr. Beecher. 
When a man of this kind excites a little opposition of a personal 
or theological sort we instantly stand by him to prove, not our 
admiration, but our love. Why, we owe more to him than we 
can ever owe to the men who have opposed him ; it is simply 
impossible for us to be silent under certain kinds of criticism. 
Dignified opposition I would rather invi'e than decline ; but let it 
be dignified in such a case. Understand that in a controversy there 
are two parties, and if one of the parties is a man seventy-three 
years of age, known throughout the world for his philanthropy,, 
his patriotism, his religious conviction and earnestness, the man 
on the other side must not be a mere niggler and pedant and 
trifler, and he must not oppose frivolous objections and pedantic 
criticisms when he is face to face with such an opponent. There 
is a law of decency in controversy, and that law ought to be 
observed. Looking back upon the few weeks Mr. Beecher has 
been with us, I have been amazed at the variety of personality 
and character interested in his coming and going, and in his 
whole action. Amongst those who have invited him to 
hospitality, or heard his lectures, or attended his religious 
services, or written to express interest in his being in England, 
I find names representiug an almost startling diversity. One 
amongst the first to invite him, rather to friendly than to merely 
state hospitality, was the chief magistrate of this city. Then I 
find the name, ever to be honoured, of the Right Hon. W. E. 
Gladstone ; of Lord Iddesleigh — a name of which no Englishman 
need ever be ashamed, who, though differing from Mr. Glad- 
stone in politics, is a noble patriot ; Professor Bryce, the Dean 
of Westminster, the Dean of Canterbury, Archdeacon Farrar ? 
Canon Fleming, Canon Wilberforce, the Baroness Burdett- 
Coutts Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, Professor Tyndale, Sir John 
Lubbcck, George Jacob Holyoake, Mr. Herbert Spencer. Who 
else could have touched such a variety of character ? The man 
who touches such a circumference of character is net unlikely 



108 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

now and then to find three men in opposition to him. If he 
appealed solely to men who went on crutches; if he held 
communion only with persons who were over ninety years of 
age, one might expect him to have a good deal of insipid 
unanimity round about him for his daily delectation ; but when 
he speaks to the world in the language of the world on the great 
burning questions of the time, who can wonder that, now and 
again, there should be some people wiser than to join in the 
multitudinous acclamation ? I cannot forget the banquet which 
was given to Mr. Beecher by his American friends. I recal 
the presence at that banquet of Mr. Phelps, the American 
Minister, also an American Chief Justice, the Consuls of many 
American cities ; Sir Thomas Chambers, Q.C, the Recorder of 
London ; Sir Francis Wyatt Truscott, an ex-Lord Mayor of 
London ; Mr. Charles Dickens, Canon Fleming, Rev. H. R. 
Haweis, and many leading editors, journalists, ministers, and 
men of business, whose enthusiasm was simply unbounded. 
Then I can never forget the meeting which was held the other 
night in the Congregational Memorial Hall and Library for the 
purpose of giving a welcome on the part of the London Congre- 
gational Board to Mr. and Mrs. Beecher. Mrs. Beecher is 
actually sitting among the students this morning. She will 
bear looking at, so you can rise if you like ; but do not let us 
have a bobbing up and down. There is another lady [Mrs. 
Parker] sitting with her, simply, let us say, for appearance' 
sake. They are both y reachers ; they preach at home. They 
are not wanting in eloquence, in criticism, in deep emotion, 
and in some little rags and patches of anti-Calvinistic theology. 
I refer to the two ladies on this occasion, because on that 
evening to which I was especially alluding, not only were the 
London Congregational ministers present, but their wives 
accompanied them. I do not know when we have had a more 
cordial communion, one with another, and all with our distin- 
guished visitor. You will know whether that Board represented 
the Congregationalism of London and the suburbs when I tell 
you that I saw there such men as Dr. Allon, Dr. Newth, Dr. 
Reynolds, the Rev. J. G. Rogers, Professor A. Redford, Pro- 
fessor Radford Thomson, Professor McAll, Professor Godwin 

, if these men do not represent us, then it is because we 

are not worth representing. These are among the foremost 
men we have in our Congregational pulpits and colleges in 
London, and they were delighted to Lave an opportunity of 
welcoming Mr. Beecher to then hospitality. After all, referring 
to the few and most friendly observations made by the last 
speaker, Mr. Beecher was, in reality, at Norwich. There are 
tw r o ways of being at a place, one is in being there personally, 
physically, visibly, and tangibly, and the other is being there 



ADDBESS TO STUDENTS. 109 1 

in the hearts of the people, in the memory of their love, and 
I, though not there myself, will answer for it that no name men- 
tioned in the assembly evoked a more cordial enthusiasm than 
the name of Mr. Beecher. But never make too much of any- 
thing of that kind, always allow liberty of opinion, and allow 
men to stand forth and say they object to this or that, but let 
me repeat my caution, always let it be done with decency 
and dignity, in a manner worthy of all the interests and 
persons that are involved. Mr. Beecher has had festivities 
of one kind or another, or is to have them, in London, in 
Glasgow, in Liverpool, and in Belfast. The last letter he had 
was from that great Irish city, asking him if he would allow 
the ministers of Belfast to organise a meeting for the purpose of 
giving him a welcome. These are occasions you cannot 
artificially arrange, they are expressions of spontaneous 
love, they are utterances you cannot check, and all the 
value depends, not upon their being organised, but upon their 
being voluntary — the spontaneous utterance of grateful and 
loving hearts. I am glad to say, in reference to some of the 
questions which have been put, that, Mr. Beecher having been 
in my house now for some weeks, I have learned two or three 
defects in his character, and I am prepared now to mention 
them. "We have resolved ourselves into a confidential' 
committee of the whole House. Mr. Beecher pleasantly 
says he is not afraid of all of us. I think he did not 
include the chairman. Now I will make him afraid. -The 
defects of his character which I shall mention are defects 
which you will instantly recognise. First of all, it is 
next to impossible to get him to answer letters. That is 
a serious drawback. A man who receives about forty letters 
a day ought to answer them every one with his own 
hand, and be grateful to those friends who have forgotten 
to enclose a stamped and directed envelope. Mr. Beecher 
has nothing else to do ; why should not he answer all 
the letters and pay the postage ? Here he is singularly 
deficient; yet, in wonderful keeping with the self-contra- 
diction of his character, he has a pen always in his 
vest pocket— a self-supplying pen— and sometimes, for about 
five minutes, he is seized with a cacoethes scribendi, 
and nothing will do but he must answer letters. I do not 
believe he finishes all of them, and some of them I believe he 
never posts ; but there is a general trust in Providence that, 
having begun a letter, somebody else will finish it, and, having 
left it about somewhere, somebody in the course of nature may 
be weak enough to post it. You cannot wonder that there 
should be three men here and there who feel a little uneasy. 
The wonder is that there are not eighteen, such an eighteen as 



110 ADDEESS TO STUDENTS. 

the Tower in Siloam fell on. Then, again, I have discovered in 
him a most aggravating feature — he is eternally young. I wish 
he were about my age, and then he would know what it is to 
be tired ; but he positively wears me out with his redundant, 
superabundant, ever recovering and ever-renewing energy. 
One of our friends who has just spoken remarked in a tone of 
suggestive pathos that in order to be at this meeting he got up 
this morning between five and six. There was the wail in the 
tone as of a modern Jeremiah. Why, I cannot keep Mr. Beecher 
in bed much after five any morning. Now, that is a trifle 
irritating to a man like me, because, like the last speaker. I only 
get up when I cannot help it. I like- it to be the last thought 
and the last device, and to have about it a mournful suggestion 
of absolute necessity. Here is a man who cannot be kept in bed, 
and yet all the while he is coming before the public with the 
false colour of being seventy -three years of age. Believe it who 
can. I have lived with him, and I have no hesitation in 
expressing the most desperate scepticism as to that arithmetic. 
He says he is not good at figures, and I suppose when inventing 
an age for himself there w?sa roundness and a mellowness and 
a rhythmic completeness about seventy-three that suited his 
then state of mind. Keverse the figures, and you have 
the man's true description as to energy and pith and 
unwearying continuance in all good doing. But I have 
happily found out the secret of his sermon composition. 
I wish that Mr. Beecher had left me to answer that 
question when it was put to him. I know now how Mr. 
Beecher does it. He reads, and writes, and thinks, and jokes, 
and criticises, and inquires, and goes through a complete gamut 
of human emotions and exercises, and then suddenly he says : 
" I think I must bid you all good-night," and he is gone, and in 
the morning he comes down with his sermon. That is how he 
does it. Now that you know the secret, fellow-student, go 
thou and do likewse. I have now to conclude this Conference 
by asking you what other man in all the Christian pulpit could 
have gathered this meeting in the City of London this morning 
at eleven o'clock ? Is there no significance in an assembly of 
this kind gathered under such circumstances '? Do men come 
out in thousands on such a rainy morning as this merely for the 
sake of coming out ? What is the meaning of these ministers, 
students, men of business, patient, suffering women being here ? 
Why are you here ? Not to admire mere genius, but to say : ''Here 
is a man whose presence we would love to look upon awhile, 
because his sermons have been useful to us in the dark and cloudy 
time, in the day of desperate sorrow, in the hour when the house 
was desolate and cold." Letters breathing that spirit have been 
received by Mr. Beecher — letters worthy of a place in the sacred 



ADDKESS TO STUDENTS. Ill 

canon itself because of their pure pathos and grateful affection 
When a man of that kind is amongst us we know how to receive 
him. We receive him with the enthusiasm of love and with the 
enthusiasm of religious thankfulness. As for his character, 
have but one desire : I only desire, having seen him in the house, 
having watched him in all the ways of his household life — I 
repeat that, in reference to his character, I have but one desire, 
and that is that I might successfully imitate it. Keviewing the 
whole occasion, then; dear Christian friends, if it be your will 
that I should now in your name offer Mr. Beecher the right- 
hand of fellowship, will you signify the same by standing up ? 

The whole assembly then rose, and amid the loudest accla- 
mations the Chairman and Mr. Beecher shook hands. 

Rev. Dr. Clifford pronounced the Benediction, and the 
enthusiastic proceedings were brought to a close. 



ADDRESS TO THE FREEDMAN'S 
AID SOCIETY. 



The meeting of the Freedrnan's Aid Society Mission, at 
which Mr. Beecher had promised to speak, was held in West- 
minster Chanel, on Saturday morning, October 16. Mr. 
Beecher was received with cheers when he walked up the 
aisle and entered the vestry. After a hymn had been sung, 
and prayer offered by Dr. Davies, Bev. H. Simon said they 
had often before welcomed there the friends of the Freedrnan's 
Aid Society, though never at the same hour of the day. Mr. 
Beecher himself, however, had fixed the time, and they were 
ready to do anything to oblige him. Had it been evening the 
place would have been crowded. They had had letters from 
Canon Farrar and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton regretting 
their absence. The secretary, Bev. Gwynne Jones, then read 
an abstract of the report of the Society. A resolution was next 
moved by Dr. Flickenger, to the effect that the report be 
printed, and that sundry officers be appointed. The resolution 
was seconded by Bev. Dr. McEwan, who said that the present 
mission spoke to them from America, for the missionary, Dr. 
Flickenger, was an American. He hailed with joy all chances 
of uniting two such countries, especially by the reception of 
such a visitor as Mr. Beecher, whose name had been associated 
with procuring freedom for the slaves, and who had been 
distinguished for his fearless, faithful advocacy of liberty. Dr. 
McEwan bore strong testimony to the fitness of American mis- 
sionaries, and to their method of employing for the work men 
of African race. Then Mr. Beecher was called upon, and, 
rising amid loud and repeated cheers, said : 

I am requested to move the following resolution : — 

" That this meeting, impressed with the great importance of 
the employment of native agency in mission fields, cordially 
approves of the action of the committee in the training of young 



ADDRESS TO THE FEEEDMAN'S AID SOCIETY. 113 

coloured men to carry the Gospel to the tribes of their own 
race on the Continent of Africa, and rejoices at the success that 
has attended their labours during the past year.*' 

This is in some sort a text, and I never was good 
at sticking to my text, and shan't stick to this. For 
oftentimes a text is like a gate which the children 
love to swing on, but at other times a text is that 
gate through which you go into the great fields 
beyond, and use it and pass on. So I will to-day, 
with your leave, pass into a larger consideration, 
though the specific recommendation of this resolu- 
tion has my heartiest concurrence. 

A Coming Conflict. 

It seems to me that a new phase of God's work 
has set in. In the beginning of missions nations 
stood still, and Christian churches sent out to them 
the missionaries, and they were the centre, and the 
light, and the executive agency ; but since those 
early days of missions — and in our land I remember 
the beginning of them, it is in the compass of one 
life that they have begun and swelled, and become 
so great — it seems to me that we are entering upon 
the consideration of something more than just this, 
Can that particular nation be visited, enlightened, 
and Christianised ? This will always be an initial 
work, but as it has been carried on it has given rise 
to a secondary missionary consideration, that is of 
much broader scope ; and that is one in which God 
is sending the heathen to us, and not us to the 
heathen. In part that is going on to-day. I believe 
that the question of to-day is, What will the strong 
do with the weak the world round ? What will the 
enlightened do with the ignorant ? There come to 
us in our country — in your country and mine, 
America, as I also own England as well as America 
— large bands of heathens, landing mostly on our 
western shore. The Mongolians are swarming, and 



114 ADDEESS TO THE 

we beat them, we stone them, we kick them and kill 
them, and refuse by every consideration to grant 
them one single leaf of the tree of life, for fear that 
more will come, and then we wonder that these men 
do not accept the Gospel. The gospel of the heart, 
I think, possibly they would accept, but the gospel 
of the boot they don't like, and I lo not wonder at 
it. But there have been faithful men in the 
churches— even of the churches that did not wish to 
see any more Chinese come — who have opened the 
Sunday-schools, and had classes of the young China- 
men, and have developed in them, by the power of 
God, a true Christian life ; and there is evidence, 
abundantly, that with all the difficulties of access to 
them, it is not in vain that the Gospel is preached to 
the Chinamen. But they are interfering with our 
labourers ; that is to say, they are more industrious 
than they are. They are more simple in their habits. 
They drink less whisky and chew less tobacco, and 
do more work in the day, and feed upon simpler and 
less expensive aliments than they. They say the 
Anglo-Saxon is of a higher civilisation. Civilisation 
does not run toward the animal. It is not how much 
men eat, and how much they wear, and how much 
leisure they have for laziness. These are not tokens 
of civilisation ; but the Mongolians can do more with 
less expense than the Anglo-Saxon can, and so there 
is a bar to their entrance and to their prosperity in our 
midst. The same is true in your colonies. I read in 
the news only the other day a long statement of the 
inconveniences which the civilised Englishman felt 
in the presence of the uncivilised Mongolians in your 
colonies, and they are going to bar them out, and to 
make their stay as inconvenient as is possible. So 
there is going on throughout Christendom this spirit 
by which men that have been developed, civilised, 
great in commerce, productive in manufactures, who 
have a true conception of the State, and of its mul- 



feeedman's aid society. 115 

tiplied offices and departments — this upper class of 
men are standing to-day and saying substantially 
in the mart, and everywhere else, that the Mon- 
golians must substantially be the servants of as. 
And what kind of Gospel is that to be proclaimed 
in the face of Him who found Himself equal with 
God, but made Himself of no reputation ; being in 
the form of man, He humbled Himself even unto 
death; and wherefore did God highly exalt Him, 
that His name should be above all names, but for 
this, that He by reason of light, and knowledge, and 
purity, and strength, put Himself underneath the 
feet of those that were ignorant, and out of the 
way, and unable to help and save themselves? 
Greatness in God is service, not dominancy, the 
motherhood of the human race ; and so there is on 
the one part commerce that is breaking down bar- 
riers, that is introducing a certain sort of civilisa- 
tion ; that is making intercourse between nation and 
nation more easy than it was ; but there is that 
other element also — the selfishness of money- 
making, the selfishness of the under-toned civilised 
man, that is saying to God : " We will send the 
Gospel to those nations on the earth if you will only 
keep them at home." Now the Gospel that such a 
nation has to send had better be kept at home itself. 
Well, the same was true and will probably be- 
come true in regard to the great swarms of men in 
Africa ; but when they shall, little by little, have 
learned the Gospel and have felt that yeast leaven- 
ing the whole lump, you may depend upon it they 
are not always going to stay at home : " The earth 
is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof," and as we 
are the sons of God when we are believers in Jesus 
Christ, they are going to have some share in the 
world as well as you. The Anglo-Saxon people have 
got ahead, but there are a good many million folks 
that are coming along after, and the African has a 



116 ADDEESS TO THE 

Tight to live in England ; the African has a right to 
live in France ; the African has a right to live in 
iRussia, exchanging one barbarism for another. 
These are the questions that are coming rip, and 
"there is a strife between the Gospel and the spirit 
of man in political economy to-day. Intimately 
'connected with this is the question of missions, 
namely, the power of the ripper parts of society to 
civilise, lift up, and help the under parts of society. 
It is a question of dynasties to-day. It is the ques- 
tion among nations. In other words, it is the 
sprouting of that seed of the Gospel which has been 
said to be, as the Kingdom of God is said to be, like 
1;he little seed that is no bigger than a grain of 
mustard- seed, but which is spreading all over the 
world ; it is the reflex influence of the Christianity 
of civilised races that has raised up these questions 
abroad and at home; arid you are going to have a 
greater battle to fight in Old England and in New 
-America, in France, and in Germany — the question 
-of the relative rights of men among themselves, the 
higher middle, and the lower sections of men. 
' The Gospel looks upon all men with one look. 
The mother sees a great difference among her 
children. Some are older, some are yet unfledged, 
and some are babes, but the cradle rules the whole. 
It is the bottom that brings down every rank. 
Mother and father and older brothers and older sisters 
and the younger, they all worship the cradle, be- 
cause it is so helpless, so weak. The babe is the 
monarch in the kingdom of love, and when that 
kingdom of love shall begin to have great potency 
among men, it will not be the coronet nor the 
sceptre, nor will it be the artisan's tools ; the sym- 
pathies of men will take hold of the bottom of society, 
and the enthusiasm will be how we shall use our 
knowledge, our civilisation, our riches, to help up 
-•the bottom to a higher level than that at which it is 



feeedman's aid society. Ill 

now. Missions have not died out. The forms will 
gradually change, but the spirit of missions will be 
foreign and domestic, and it will be the same, be- 
cause the nations of the earth are going to mix.- 
What is the meaning of all this rapid transition 
upon sea and upon land ? How is it we have been, 
transformed in one generation into a racing people? 
I am not referring to quadrupedal racing, but we- 
are a people that go up and down in our own coun- 
try. Travelling is almost now no more than staying 
at home. I remember when a man that had been 
to England was looked on in his village as a wonder- 
ful man. " He has been to England." A man that 
has been to England and got home now is as com- 
mon as coppers, and they do not think anything* 
about it. Kailroads, steamships, and various means- 
of inter-communication, electricity, and mail-bags . 
are changing the whole framework of society, and. 
men are coming together and mixing. But the 
same question is coming in our own midst. We 
would like to have it settled out in missionary 
stations, and not bother us. It is very cheap to 
send a missionary to Africa, but it is another kind o£L 
mission to invite Africa to come here and be con>- 
verted, and you take care of them in the process^ 
But that is going to be a great deal of our work in 
the days that are to come. 

The Bays of Slavery. 

Now, in regard to America, and the condition of 
things there, I have a right to speak. You in Eng- 
land have no such right to speak about slavery as I. 
have. You had a great deal of it once, but it was; 
in the West Indies ; you kept it there. We have- 
had it right in our bowels ; we have grown up in it,. 
I specially lived more than fifty years an exile from 
more than one full half of the territory of my own 
country. Until after the war I could not have gone 
with safety to my life over Mason and Dixey's Lino 



118 ADDEESS TO THE 

into the south. My sister-in-law was turned back, 
because rny name was on her trunk, before the war, 
and she was not permitted to go to Florida. The 
name itself was worse than dynamite — and a high- 
spirited man, and withal a Christian man, felt the 
indignity of being an exile in the greater part of his 
own country. Did not I live when the Tract 
Society that was ordained to send the Gospel out in 
its printed form would print tracts on using tobacco 
and on the sin of dancing, but would not send a 
tract out on the sin of buying and selling 
men ? Have not I lived when in the great 
majority of churches it was not safe for a man 
to be known to be an Abolitionist ? Have I not 
lived in times in the North when a man that dared 
to pray for slaves in the prayer meeting of the church 
was ejected and finally fought out of the church 
itself? Have I not lived to see churches by the 
hundreds and thousands into which a coloured man 
could not come ? No matter how good, nor how well 
apparelled, he could not come except into the " nigger 
pew." Have I not lived in my very pleasant home 
to know that in the omnibuses a coloured man or 
woman could not be permitted to ride ? Have I not 
lived to see everywhere on railroads a distinction 
made ? Have I not lived to be invited to lectures in 
halls whose fundamental articles of agreement were 
that no coloured man or coloured meeting should 
be permitted to occupy the hall ? And I have lived 
to see the whole of it swept away. I have lived not 
only to see that, but I have lived to see a result 
which should cheer every Christian man associated 
with this benevolent work ; I have lived to see 
vindicated the character of the coloured man — the 
African. It was said in the controversies on the 
subject of slavery, that to destroy the ownership 
would be to leave the vass mass — the four millions 
of men — unable to take care of themselves ; that 
they needed a white man to take care of them. I 



freedman's aid society. 119 

have lived to see the old masters themselves, and 
mistresses begging at the door of their emancipated 
slaves for a loaf of bread and for clothing ; I have 
lived to see that while the old master went down 
his slaves came up, and they have vindicated their 
reputation as respects their power of taking care of 
themselves, and rising even under the severe and 
sharp competition between the labouring man and 
the organised commercial enterprises that are now 
pervading the South. The Africans are doing well. 
I contested often and often the feeling that they 
were a miserable, cowardly race, and yet, when the 
war came, and the Spirit of the Lord gave wisdom 
to Lincoln to declare emancipation, and the Africans 
began to be enlisted in our army, that very day victory 
perched on oar banner. I have lived to see that 
they not only were not cowards, but they made the 
very best soldiers that we had in the whole army ; 
and such men as General Grant, and such men as 
General Sherman, and usually the best generals, all 
at length said that better soldiers never were made 
when they were well trained and cared for than the 
cowardly African. They took to business with a 
skill, alacrity, and pride that was wonderful to be 
seen. Why not? When the man that did not 
dare before to look up in the presence of his master 
found himself wearing the uniform of the United 
States Government, carrying his musket by his side, 
walking up and down with conscious dignity, it was 
more to him than a crown would be to prince's son 
here. It was the dawn of manhood with the slave. 
That is a testimony as to their capabilites of taking 
on civilisation. 

Character of the Blacks. 

There are some other things in regard to them. 
The soil of the African mind is peculiarly favourable 
for religion. It is peculiarly favourable for that side 
of religion which in the practical Anglo-Saxon 



120 ADDRESS TO THE 

mind needs a good deal of help. By nature they 
believe in the invisible too much ; they have got too 
much of the invisible. They are superstitious ; they 
are full of signs, and of all manner of tokens. They 
believe in voices from the air ; they believe in calls ; 
they believe in the wonder-working power of Pro- 
vidence and of Divine grace, and of angelic elements. 
They are a large way from a hard, cold, logical 
religion. They are rich ; they are emotive ; they are 
spiritual ; they are men that pray ; they are men that 
believe. An old negro woman said to Mrs. Stowe, 
"Why, when I read the Gospels I am puzzled, I 
cannot understand them ; but when I read in Revela- 
tions, oh ! I understand all that." They have a very 
distinct and rich imagination working towards re- 
ligion, and when they become more intelligent they 
will introduce, I believe, a style of piety which we 
very much need here, and we are going to be depen- 
dent on the African genius in the future civilisation. 
Another thing. Black as they are, and uncomely 
to those that do not believe they are handsome, they 
are, as regards our own selves and race, the masters 
of politeness and the masters of social and civil 
refinement. You hear a Yankee — that is to say, a 
transplanted Englishman — with his plain, practical 
modes of address. " Well, old fellow, how are you 
this morning?" with a slap on the shoulder, all of 
which is very frank indeed — very. But you see two 
coloured men meeting together in the street, and 
especially a man and a woman, and she says, 
" Good morning, sir S How go you this morning, 
sir ? " and he is full of compliments and gracious- 
ness and gentleness, and the politeness between the 
sexes is excruciating. It is not put on ; it is spon- 
taneous ; it bubbles up from their very nature. Of 
course, you won't wish to hear me say that by-and- 
by we shall be very much improved in good manners 
when ©ur civilisation has been largely taught by the 
African genius, and therefore I won't say it. 



feeedman's aid society. 121 

But there is something more in the African cha- 
racter of which I wish to speak. I hold that there 
never has been yet upon the face of this earth, 
under any kingdom, in any period, anywhere, such 
an exhibition of submission to the Divine will as 
has been shown by the slaves of America. There 
w T ere four millions of men during our war that knew 
just as w T eli as their masters did that this was a 
war either for slavery or for liberty ; they were 
couched down in the families of their masters, and 
the Southern armies had drafted almost every able- 
bodied man away from the plantations and away 
from the villages, and the land was really in the 
power of the Africans that were left at home ; they 
knew their wrongs, they knew that their children had 
been sold from their arms ; they knew that they 
lived in darkened huts and cottages, deprived of the 
elements of civilisation ; they were sensitive to it ; 
and yet during that whole period of five years there 
was never a record made of cruelty on the part of 
the slaves to the helpless families of their masters. 
There never was an insurrection during that period 
in all the length and breadth of the Southern 
States. Prayers there were, and singing and tears 
for deliverance, and faith in God that the day was 
coming and that they were to be free ; but they 
sat down in perfect patience and in fidelity to their 
masters during that great struggle. If there ever 
were men, by multitudes, by millions, that fulfilled 
the Apostolic command to be faithful to those that 
were their masters in the Lord, it was the American 
slaves. Parallel to this is an act of faith that I think 
is equal to that of the old patriarch, and on a much 
bigger scale. From political necessity, but also, on 
the part of the Abolitionists, with an enduring 
faith in the safety of liberty, our Government gave- 
to those four millions of emancipated slaves the 
right of suffrage. You are diddling and question- 
ing whether it is safe to have manhood suffrage ; 



122 ADDEESS TO THE 

we gave manhood suffrage to four million bar- 
barians, and they have justified the trust. They 
have voted oftentimes ignorantly and foolishly. 
What child ever learned to read without misspell- 
ing a word ? What apprentice ever came to his 
trade without spoiling a tool or timber ? They had 
to have some time for schooling to learn how, but 
from the very beginning it may be said that the 
emancipated slaves voted more wisely than their 
late masters ever did. 

Negro Advancement. 

Well, there is now another question. Have the 
coloured people, the Africans, justified the trust that 
was put in them for their industry and for their 
enterprise, and for the accumulation of property? 
Yes, they have. Of course, in such a horde there 
would be a greater per cent, of indolence, and of 
men who would waste their opportunities. Let any 
nation that is without a whole mass of lazy men 
that live on sucking the prosperity out of others 
cast the first stone at them. They are owning the 
land ; they are in possession of taxable property now 
to the extent of more than 150,000,000 dollars in 
the Southern States. They are gaining all the 
time — more rapidly in some parts than in others — 
but on the whole gaining in thrift, in economy, in 
wise living. By-and-by, though not exactly at this 
point, I must tell you my experience when I was 
sent by the Government at the raising of the flag at 
Fort Sumner, to view the Sea Islands, where the 
Sea Island cotton is mainly raised, and to make a 
report as to the operation of emancipation upon 
those islands. Going to Helena I saw piles of 
boxes and goods and all manner of things on the 
landing, and I said to the superintendent, " Do the 
slaves buy as much as used to be bought for them 
by their masters ? " "A great deal more." " Well, 
what things do they buy ? " "Buy? Looking- 



fkeedman's aid society. 123 

glasses and candles." Looking-glasses, of course, 
to ascertain whether there were any elements of 
beauty in their faces. Candles, however ! said I. 
"What do they want with candles?" In the old 
slave times a slave was never allowed to have a 
lighted candle in his cabin after it was dark ; 
nothing, unless it was a fire, was allowed, and the 
candles became in their eyes the signal of liberty, 
and the moment that they were free they said, 
" Give us light." There may be a moral application 
of this much more important than I have time now 
to develop. The moment that freedom comes men 
want light. 

A Castle in the Air. 

Well, the question then comes up again, are they 
making any progress in knowledge. They are. 
They are outrunning even their white neighbours. 
Not only that, they are showing themselves to be 
apt ; they are civilisable, they are not merely sus- 
ceptible of Christian religion, but they are suscep- 
tible also of intellectual culture. There have arisen 
among them men that in the Divine art of preaching 
stand second to none anywhere, white or black. 
They are showing themselves competent as instruc- 
tors. From one association, the American Mis- 
sionary Association, they are sending out every 
year one thousand men and women, educated in our 
schools, that have been built for them, to become 
teachers, lawyers, doctors, and preachers among 
their own kind throughout the South. And this is 
but one contribution. There are in Nashfield not 
only the Jubilee Singers Memorial Institution, 
and the Fisk University, but there is also a 
large college seminary by the Baptists, and another 
by the Methodists, and another by the Pres- 
byterians. There are five institutions for the 
education of the coloured people and for sending 
them out among their own kind throughout the 
length and breadth of the South, and they are 



124 ADDEESS TO THE 

animated by a true, heroic, Christian feeling. I 
think there never was such a phenomenon as the 
building of Fisk University. We talk about castles 
in the air. That is the only castle that ever I knew 
built by singing from foundation to the top. That 
is a castle in the air worth having. They sang 
through our country, and. it is one of the things 
that I cherish with pride, that they took their start 
from Plymouth Church Lecture Room. Oh, those 
days after the war ! My brother Thomas wrote to 
me that this Jubilee Band were trying to sing their 
way to the East, and see if they could not raise a 
little money, and urged me to look after them. 
They called on me. There was not a mixed blood 
amoug them ; they were black as midnight, every 
one of them. I said : " I do not know whether the 
folks will bear it or not, but come round on Friday 
night, at the prayer-meeting, and I will give you a 
chance." On Friday night they sat there, and after 
the service concluded, I said to the people, " There 
is a band of singers, every one of whom has been 
baptized in slavery, and they are coming to the East 
to see if they can raise some little funds for their 
education and their elevation, and now I wish that 
you would hear them sing a few pieces." I called 
them up on the platform, for we do not have any of 
these devil engines of pulpits in the Plymouth 
Church. We have platforms, where a man is not 
ashamed to show himself from top to bottom. But, 
then, we are handsomer in America than we are in 
England. Well, they appeared in double rank, 
stretching clear across the platform in the lecture- 
room, and there were about 1,100 people there and 
in the parlours that open into it, and they began to 
sing. It was still as death. They sang two pieces. 
Tears were trickling down a great many eyes. They 
sang three pieces, and they burst out into a perfect 
enthusiasm of applause ; and when they had sung 
four and five pieces my people rose up in mass and 



feeedman's aid society. 125 

said, "these folk must sing in the church." On 
Sunday morning I gave out the word that on Wed- 
nesday the church would be open on payment, not 
of a shilling — that is the English price. Fifty cents 
is what we call a respectable fee at the door for 
anything. Anything that is not worth fifty cents is 
not worth trying. I had them sing on Sunday 
morning, and on Wednesday night the church was 
crowded and crammed, and from that they went on 
conquering and to conquer. They sang up and 
down our own country ; they sang here ; they sang 
in the presence of the Koyal Family : they sang in 
Paris ; they sang in Berlin ; they sang before the 
Emperor William ; and came back, and they had 
earned some 150,000 dollars for the building of that 
university. The slaves were evangels. Many and 
many an old slave nurse was the means of the con- 
version of hermaster ; many and many a community 
had seen revivals spring up from the humble zeal of 
cabin slaves. With all this experience of them in 
our own midst, in our own families, tried by bond- 
age, tried by war, tried by the poverty of emancipa- 
tion, tried by schools and opportunities of civilisa- 
tion, tried by the conflicts between them and the 
white in all the professions, they have proved them- 
selves to be men fit for the purposes of God in the 
rising kingdom of God in this world. 

A Glorious Future. 

Now, they came from Africa mainly ; fresh im- 
portations brought men with manacles on their 
wrists. I saw slaves in Charleston that had but 
just come over from the midst of the pagan hordes 
of Africa ; and if such are the results of African life 
and genius, crushed by bondage and agitated by 
wrongs, what will Africa become by-and-by when 
she shall have been Christianised and civilised, and 
brings her peculiar genius, consecrated, sanctified, 



126 ADDRESS TO THE 

and enlightened by the Spirit of God, to bear 
upon the welfare of the whole human race? I 
believe that God has a contribution to this civilisa- 
tion of the future that Africa shall bring ; I believe 
that God has in the hoards of ages material that yet 
one day will bud and blossom m the great fields of 
Christianity ; I believe that, above almost any other 
nation, the wronged, despised, and contemptible 
African — " coloured nigger," as they used to call 
him — will yet serve himself gloriously by that con- 
tribution that should be made by this great conti- 
nent, long lying in darkness and in the shadow of 
death, but destined to cry out, " The light has 
come : the glory of the Lord has arisen upon us." 
And when the ransomed of the Lord shall return 
and come to Zion with songs of everlasting joy upon 
their heads, there will be no distinction between 
nation and nation, there will be no distinction 
between colour and colour, there will be no distinc- 
tion between condition and condition. He that loves 
Godwill be God's noble man, and they will all walk to- 
gether as sons, and sons of the noble God in that great 
procession, and in that great and universal victory. 

The Chairman proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Beecher, 
and wished him and Mrs. Beecher all the best things on their 
homev/drd journey. — Rev. T. Penrose seconded the motion, 
and suggested that ministers should preich and hold meet- 
ings on behalf of the mission. 

The Greater England. 
Mr. Beechee, in acknowledging the vote of 
thanks, said : I am here to-day because I am much 
interested in this particular department of mission 
work, as naturally I should be. My whole life has 
been an advocacy and defence of the African. I am 
here, also, for a special reason. It is out of compli- 
ment to my friend, Dr. Tomkins. Little things go a 
long way with me. I have not many virtues, and 
therefore I want to make the most of those I have, 
and gratitude is one of them. When I came to 



feeedman's aid society. 127 

England in 1863 my reception was not enthusiastic. 
I came to London to address a great meeting at 
Exeter Hall. I was in a depressed condition, for at 
Liverpool, for three hours, I was obliged to speak 
against every conceivable noise and insult, and I had 
to use my voice nntil I had not got any left, and I 
came down to the London meeting much depressed. 
This was the great climax, and I could not speak 
out loud. I had spoken all those days, and they 
were days of tribulation. The public sentiment of 
English people — except the labouring classes — was 
not with us of the North, and I was sailing under 
very high colours in refusing to accept hospitality 
from any one not in favour of the North ; and when 
I came down to London I was like a gun dismounted 
from its carriage, and I felt bad. But I said : Lord, 
if by my humiliation Thy cause can be served, 
humble me to the very dust. At that time there 
came to me two brethren — Dr. Waddington, now in 
heaven, and Dr. Tomkins — and they comforted me, 
and encouraged me, and we knelt down and prayed. 
Prayer was always better than wine to me, and I 
arose much refreshed. It was on the eve of speak- 
ing in Exeter Hall, and although my voice was not 
entirely restored there was a wide rift between the 
top and bottom chords, and I managed to get through 
my speech. And when brother Tomkins started this 
society to serve the cause of the freed men I wished 
to show my regard for him and my memory of the 
kindness which he did to me when I was iti England 
before. I should have been glad to have added a 
word in respect to what my friend from Scotland 
said as to the unity of our race in America and in 
Great Britain. I have that very much at heart. I 
have long felt that God has given to our race a 
wonderful development of civilisation in the future. 
Our language is copious, strong, and adapted to 
every noble use. Our literature is a very library of 
religion, and it is the noblest exhibition of patriot- 



128 ADDEESS TO THE FEEEDMAN'S AID SOCIETY. 

ism, of law, of democracy — Christian democracy — 
and that language ought in the future to carry its 
treasures — that have been bought with tears of 
blood — as our contribution to all the world. Now 
England, though small, is prolific. The nest may 
be big enough to hatch the birds in, but not big 
enough to live in afterwards. England produces 
multitudes, and the policy of sending them out into 
all the southern hemisphere, and the islands, to 
colonise there and form English communities all 
round the world, is a policy of joy for the future. 
Your latest born child, together with Canada, is 
one with us. The lines are in the air, and not on. 
the ground, that separates us. Canada, the United 
States, Australia, and the islands of the sea, and the 
colonies, and Old England mav join together, never 
again to interchange blows. While the Panslavists 
are striving for unity, not for such good purpose — we, 
for the sake of God, for the sake of Christ, for the sake 
of the unity of mankind, for the sake of civilisation 
and Christianisation, let us take hold of each other's 
bands, and hold on, and march together inseparably, 
growing stronger and stronger as the day advances. 
Although kindly allusion has been made to my living 
to a good old age, I am not one to dream it possible 
that I shall ever be again among you. I have been 
received with much cordiality, and I have been so 
profoundly affected by the kind treatment of my 
English brethren of the pulpit and of the pew, of 
every state of social life, that my heart will be left 
in England. Yet, thank God, I have a heart big 
-enough to be divided, and your share is very large, 
though I need my share to do a little longer public 
work among my own people. I bid you an affec- 
tionate farewell. 

Eev. H. Simon then closed the proceedings with the 
Benediction. 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 



On Monday morning, October 18, the members of the Con- 
gregational District Board invited Mr. Beecher to be present to 
meet them at the Junior Keform Club, Stanley-street, Liverpool, 
in order that they might give to him the welcome to England 
which the uncertainty about the date of his arrival from 
America prevented their giving when first he landed at Liver- 
pool. The chair was taken by Rev. Mr. Law. Rev. Mr. 
Gwyther expressed hearty greetings to Mr. Beecher, and 
assured him of the affectionate esteem and regard in which 
he was held in this country. Rev. Mr. Dunlop followed with 
an expression of the gratitude with which English ministers 
regarded him as a teacher of teachers. The Chairman then 
asked Mr. Beecher to say to them all that it was in his heart 
to utter. 

Mr. Beecher : If I were literally to comply with 
trie remark of our esteemed chairman, and say to 
you all that it is in my heart to say, the sun would 
go down and rise again before you would get dis- 
mission ; and then it would only be the end of the 
first lesson. But there are no words for the best 
things in the human soul. So long as a thing can 
be expressed it is below the meridian ; and the 
highest thought and the finest sentiment elude the 
bondage of words. Love is a great word, but loving 
is a great deal larger than that word could imprison. 
And so all that I can do in any words that I can 
speak from time to time is but the undertone. I 
cannot see so many ministers here this morning, 
and believe as I do in the kingdom of the Lord 

K 



130 WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 

Jesus Christ and in the work of God among men, 
without feeling that in your presence I am looking 
upon things more wonderful than all of old Athens 
and all of old Borne, all that I see in cathedrals, 
all that I see in history. Those things that the 
senses can compass are far inferior to the things 
which only open themselves to our minds, and in 
our minds only to the sublimes fc parts of human 
thought and human feeling. Not, perhaps, in the 
large sense in which men sometimes use the word, 
ye are sacred; but He whom you serve is sacred, 
and if He has trained you up into His spirit you are 
to that extent sacred also. I suppose that I see 
here men more comely than the Apostles if they 
had all been here. My own impression is that they 
were a shabby set, and my impression is with 
regard to all the early Christians that they were a 
poor lot ; and yet one of the Church tells us that 
the nearer we get to primitive Cbristianity the 
purer we shall find it. You might just as well say 
in respect to Mr. Gladstone, or any other great man, 
that the further you go back, even to his babyhood, 
the more perfect you will find him to have been. 
The Church was under that great law of the seed : 
it was an undisclosed seed and germ, and if the world 
had been true to Christ, true to the liberty that is in 
Christ, the tree of life would have spread its 
branches for the healing of the nations. But with 
our eyes backward we have been butting back and 
along down the ages, tumbling over and running 
against each other, and picking ourselves up, and 
saying, "Who hit me?" and hitting back again: 
so pulling both ways. The moral power of the 
Church has been very largely squandered in 
serving the devil in days gone by. Brethren, I 
am very glad to see you. I am glad to see 
anybody in Liverpool that has any kind word 
for me. I have been here before. I have always 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 131 

described it as righting with the beasts at Ephesus. 
It was a very comely sight — provided you happened 
not to be in it. Well, it was a victory. Now there 
were some things which, if they did not justify or 
excuse the English public at that time in the relations 
which they sustained to our great struggle, palliate 
them. I do not think I can come nearer than that 
under the rule of charity. "When I came over on 
that occasion I felt as if I did not want to speak to 
an Englishman, and I had a vow which I kept, that 
I would not taste salt nor bread under any man's 
roof in Great Britain who was not in favour of the 
North. I refused to accept a penny, even of travel- 
ling expenses, that should come from an English 
hand ; I felt that it would defile me. My Church 
sent me over, and I was in their stead a witness in 
the midst of the people. But now, coming to think 
it all over, I find that, as usual, zeal is very apt to 
be uncharitable ; and when I think it all over I say 
to myself, " How should they know ? What should 
I accuse the English public of when one-third of the 
Northern men themselves were not only on the 
same ground that these Englishmen were, but were 
worse, a great deal worse, in my own country, where 
they had the opportunity of knowledge, and where 
they could have known? " But I may throw light 
on it now in retrospect by one or two words of 
explanation which will solve many troubles or diffi- 
culties in your own minds historically. When our 
Colonies were planted the principle of the Dissenter, 
that is to say, the power of the local and the in- 
dividual, was in its strength. Not only was the 
local Church a perfect and complete Church, but 
the power of the community, of the State, of the 
colony was a complete one for itself, and all the 
early history of our North American Colonies was a 
history of great jealousy, lest by association some 
dominant power would get control over xhem, and 



132 WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 

restrain that liberty of the individual, and that 
liberty of the locality for which they suffered exile 
and immeasurable sufferings of the wilderness, and 
it was not until the Indian wars first compelled 
them to come together that you could get 
the New England Colonies to have anything 
to do with each other organically, to bind 
themselves under any common harness, and it 
was not till the great war of separation, 
the revolutionary war as we always call it on 
our side, that you would bring all the colonies of 
New England, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, 
Delaware, Maryland, and the southern ones Georgia, 
Alabama, and so on, into any sort of cohesion, they 
had such intense jealousy of their individual rights, 
and when they came, as the result of the war, into a 
confederation, for that was the first form of the con- 
stitution, they were very jealous of their separate 
rights, and it was a hard thing to make an approach 
where every kernel of wheat refused to be ground, 
and where they undertook to maintain their 
separateness, while finding their way out into 
something like union. Among the elements that 
resisted the perfect and complete political union 
was the existence of slavery in the South. All New 
England was in favour of a large freedom, but the 
South had just then begun to develop the profit- 
able side of slavery, and in the Council there was 
this great element — " If we remain separate we 
should be broken to pieces ; we must come into 
unity by some sort of compromise the one with 
the other." The North demanded that the word 
" slavery " should not go into the constitution ; the 
South said, " There must be an understanding in 
the constitution that this is a separate institution 
within the Southern States, and you must not go 
into the Southern States to meddle with our system 
of slavery." It was not national, but it was in the 



WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 133 

sovereignty of each State to take care of it, and they 
made what are called the compromises of the con- 
stitution, and the North agreed to them, and the 
South accepted the pledge of the North that they 
would not intrude upon their domestic institutions 
within their own states, while the South should 
not intrude upon the liberty and thought of the 
Northern States. That compromise of the 
constitution was the condition on which we came 
together ; without it we never could have affiliated. 
My memory runs back to a good deal nearer the 
adoption of the constitution than I am willing 
to-day to think ; but from my childhood it was a 
matter of political honour and conscience through- 
out the North, " Let us keep the compromise we 
have made with the Southern States, and not in any 
way, by the act of the general Government, nor by 
the act of our own State, invade their rights within 
their own State boundaries. That was the feeling 
we had, and when the anti-slavery conflict began to 
swell and roll over the North and West, the South 
replied, " You are violating the compromises of the 
Constitution," and our people in the North stood 
up and said, " We are not; we never chained our 
conscience, and we never chained our understand- 
ing, and we have a right to apply moral influences 
to the suppression of slavery, but no power of the 
Government shall lay a finger on you." I felt, 
everybody felt in the North, that we should violate 
one of the most profound canons of honour if we 
did not stand to that bargain which had brought 
unity into all the States ; so when the struggle 
began, and we saw we were verging towards war we 
did not mean to meddle with slavery. We said, 
" This war is springing up or threatening, not 
because we want emancipation : in the first in- 
stance we want union, we will trust to the future 
for the abolition of slavery by commercial reasons, 



134 WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 

providential interference, and one thing and another, 
but we are entering into this great controversy not 
by a violation of our compacts and honour, but 
simply for the maintenance of this whole great 
land." Now, when the news came over here, when 
Mr. Lincoln of blessed memory wrote the letters 
that he did, and that were read here in England, 
you were not prepared to understand that these 
restraints were laid upon our conscience and honour, 
and it was said by your public men, " This is not a 
strife for abolition, this is not a strife for harmony 
or for humanity ; it is simply a strife to keep the land 
under one Government ; you have got territorial 
ambition." These were the things then said, and it 
opened quite a new idea to me when I saw they did 
not understand the force of that interior movement 
among us which restrained us from direct inter- 
ference with the rights of the Southern States, and 
gave us only the rights of moral protest. Now, 
when the war really did break out, and we found it 
was to be a war to the knife, the blade to the hilt, 
and the hilt to the handle, all the rest disappeared 
as in a moment, and from that moment there was 
not a man in all the North who had any godliness 
in him that did not say — " Now, slavery has to go ; 
they have put it to the arbitrament of war, and the 
war shall not cease until the whole thing shall have 
been cleaned out and rubbed out." You may have 
learned something at that time : I learned a good 
deal. When I come to put the two nations together 
I see what the English standpoint was. You had 
the happiness of the expressions of the great 
Thunderer at that time that was telling lies in the 
most statesmanlike manner, and was perverting the 
intelligences, as well as the consciences, of the 
people of England.. But we got through it: we 
made a clean business of it, and we not only extir- 
pated slavery — not the spirit of slavery, for that is 



WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 135 

total depravity — but the institution of slavery. You 
need not laugh ; you are all of you popes, more or 
less, but you have not found it out — others have 
very likely. When I was in Liverpool last time my 
reception was not to be considered as having been 
a meeting of the Peace Society exactly ; but for the 
present " though not joyous, but grievous," after- 
ward it worked out the " peaceable fruits of righte- 
ousness." I notice another thing : an Englishman 
is not half an Englishman who does not admire 
physical pluck and courage ; and when they found 
that Americans could stand up and fight, and 
lie down and die, and that a million men on 
either side went through five years of a war 
more prodigious than was ever fought on the 
continent of Europe, they felt that the Americans 
were a much more religious people than they had 
given them credit for. I believe that the English 
are like a cathedral with spires that reach very high 
towards heaven ; but there is in the constitution of a 
genuine Englishman a great deal of base, and that 
part that touches the ground is that part that sus- 
tains all that goes up high in the air. I judge it 
because I am an Englishman, I know what it is. 
I was born in America, but that makes no difference. 
I am an Englishman, and I should be very glad if 
some of you would only become Americans, for I 
think you would find that an American is nothing 
but an Englishman planted in a better soil. Leav- 
ing these reminiscences of the past, I want to 
impress the feeling that I have toward you in regard 
first to my own views in religious matters, and 
secondly to my thought and feeling in regard to the 
position in which God has placed you as Dissenting 
ministers, and especially Congregational ministers. 
In regard to my own theological status I went 
through the schools. Erom a boy up I was accus- 
tomed to hear debates in my father's house between 



136 WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 

able men, and my father was not the least among 
them. Day in and day out and at the table every 
point of Caivinism was examined and turned over, 
every sort of procedure that sprang up under 
religious inspiration was perfectly familiar to me. I 
went through the regular course under my father at 
Lane Presbyterian Seminary. I began my ministry 
in the Presbyterian Church, and shall never cease 
to have a warm love for that great communion. I 
went through every phase of theology so far as mere 
exterior knowledge is concerned. You would not 
dream it from reading my sermons, but it is the fact. 
One reason why I do not use theology is because I 
am so well acquainted with it. I began life in 
college with a love for science, I perused those 
branches of it that were then accessible, I became 
early a phrenologist, and I am still. I suppose in 
the last days when there will be a perfect mental 
philosophy phrenology will be found to have contri- 
buted, not the whole, but something to it, and render 
it a philosophy for the common people. Its nomen- 
clature is such that the common people can get hold 
of it better than they can in the old school. All 
these things led me aside to commune with nature. 
It arose from the mother in me, because my mother 
was an inspired woman w T ho saw God in nature as 
really as in the Book, and she bestowed that tem- 
perament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that 
aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a 
God with an everlasting present round about me. 
I thought it was poetry that led me to feel that I 
was in the presence of God in nature. I have 
changed that view. There are situations in which 
poetry means faith. It is not our native faculty for 
our minds to reach the highest things except in 
material life. A young man who undertakes to 
make love philosophically is a fool. It is the 
strongest impulse that can reach from one heart to 



WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 137 

another, and there is not a particle of premise and 
inference, and conclusion, and definition about it ; 
it is all in the air if it is anywhere. Now I feel 
there are many truths little understood in the Word 
of God because they belong to that province that is 
higher than definition, or mere bald, high and dry 
induction. They belong to the realm of faith. 
Faith, as I understand it, is imagination developed 
in the direction of religion or the highest moral 
feeling, and it varies by the whole compass of the 
earth and experience. You cannot define it except 
by saying that that is the province, that is the cen- 
tral element, the imaginative, the understanding of 
the thing that the senses cannot see, the learning of 
truth by sympathy and not by deductions and 
ratiocination. In that early day I remember soon 
having had great troubles with Calvinism. My 
father was what was called a Low Calvinist, but he 
was a good deal too high for me, and we had many 
valiant battles over the breakfast-table together, and 
I found so much trouble with Calvinism that I con- 
cluded I would get along without it. It seemed to 
me the more I read it to be in conflict with the 
revelation which God had made to me in respect to 
Jesus Christ. I could not reconcile the Cross of 
Christ and Calvary with the five points of Cal- 
vinism. It did not seem to me that they made the 
same representation of God and nature, and on the 
whole I took the New Testament as against every- 
thing else. Christ was the germ of my whole 
ministry, and I was very busy in finding Him out ; 
but He found me out, and baptized me, and I felt 
I had a sacred deposit — not to preach the word ; 1 
never had the slightest thought tha.t I should ever 
be quoted in England or known anywhere else 
except in the little villages of the States of the 
West, where my ministry began. All I wanted was 
■ — give me a clear sky and a chance of getting at the 



138 WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 

hearts of men. That was all. I had no ambi- 
tions at all. I did love Christ ; I accepted poverty 
and obscurity and sickness as well in those early 
days in the fresh-settled States I accepted them 
gladly. Cheerfully is hardly the word. In that 
way, forming my ideas simply from Christ and His 
application to the men outside, I tried to get the 
most power consistently with my individuality and 
their necessities and my view of Jesus Christ. 
Since I have been in England, only a few days ago 
after an address, a young man, apparently destined 
to the ministry, came up and said, " Mr. Beecher, I 
want to ask you one question : do you believe in the 
Divinity of Christ ? " He had been among the old 
sort, and they had got a machine and they called it 
Christ. I said to him, " I do not believe in anything 
else." Take out Christ as the earthly representa- 
tion of God, God in the flesh as much as any infinite 
can be made finite, God in human conditions just as 
far as human conditions will hold Him, but a good 
deal more and outside of that than we have any idea 
of, — take that out of my ministry and the star would 
go down and the sun set and midnight come over 
me, and death. I would not care a snap of the 
finger to preach the Gospel if I had anything else to 
preach but Christ. If men ask me, " Do you believe 
in all that has been believed about Christ?" No ; 
thank God I don't. " Do you believe that Christ set 
in a framework of theology represents Christ ? " 
Sometimes it may to some sort of folk, though I 
cannot understand how a man can accept that 
framework that theology gives to him. In a larger 
way I believe it is God indeed in the flesh and 
brought down to the door of every man's conscious- 
ness as the power of God for salvation to every man 
that believes in Him. In this way I have never 
sought to institute a system of theology. I do not 
know a man that has ever thrown more bolts and 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 139 

bais at theology than I have. It is not because I 
do not believe in theology, but because I do not 
believe in your theology. It is not the abstract 
theology I am bombarding, but that which misrepre- 
sents my God ; that school of theology that does not 
properly interpret the nature of the ever-living and 
loving God in Jesus Christ. I have never attempted 
to make a system of theology. I have merely used 
my theological knowledge to preach to the living 
consciousness of men to redeem them from sin. I 
have a system, but it is a system yet nascent. I be- 
lieve that by-and-by there will arise among sciences a 
science of theology, and that it will include in it many 
of the facts and few of the deductions of the hitherto 
reigning systems of theology. It is among the 
blessings that are to come, the dawn .of which I 
think I see all over the world. There is to be a 
stately and magnificent science of theology fit to 
top out the great substructure of science that is 
now being built throughout the whole world. If I 
can make any contributions to it, if I can create 
any hunger for it, if I can create any readiness in 
the minds of men to accept the higher developed 
theology of the future, I shall be more than re- 
warded for any amount of bastinado that I have 
been obliged to receive in my own country for my 
heterodoxy. My heterodoxy is not that I do not 
believe so much, but that I believe a great deal 
more than is current in the churches. Now I have 
been accustomed to think, not that there is no 
liberality but in the Congregational denomination, 
but that from reasons in the very genius and 
nature of Congregationalism, God appoints them 
to be the advance guard in this world. I think a 
long step was made towards purity of church life 
and organisation when our fathers adopted the 
theory of the complete, sufficient unity of each 
local church in itself. I think, therefore, that the 



140 WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 

genetic idea is amongst the Dissenters — especially 
among the Baptists and Congregationalists. The 
Presbyterians are next door, "but I think they have 
built up an architecture of church government a 
little more massive than is absolutely necessary. 
But they like it, and I like them, and if fchey want 
to carry more armour than I do, they may. I am 
satisfied like David with the five stones from the 
brook and the sling ; they may put on Saul's 
armour, if they think they can fight better with it. 
I do not grumble at that, because in the main, I 
think, they are following up the same idea that we 
are, and they are in unity with us in our land, so 
that there is no difference between the pulpits ; men 
change from pulpit to pulpit just as they change 
from hotel to hotel, or from one boarding-house to 
another, or from town to town. There is really no 
middle wall of division amongst us. Therefore, I 
look upon all the great body of Dissenters as libe- 
rators. But there is one danger, and that is this, 
that they have no external symbolisation, and there- 
fore are attempting to maintain individuality and 
purity by a symbolisation of intellectual doctrines. 
As they have hardly anything else to cling to, they 
cling to the creeds ; and just in proportion as they 
listen exclusively to the voice of God speaking a 
housand years ago, they forget to hear the voice of 
God speaking to them in the day in which they are 
living. They are all of them listening to God as He 
speaks to them on questions of humanity and 
morality, but they are afraid to meddle with the old 
systems for fear of losing something, and therefore 
are not hearing the voice of God as they should in 
regard to the reorganisation of church polity and 
doctrine. The Congregationalists, the Dissenting 
Body, are bound to believe that God is yet in the 
world revealing Himself through the channels of 
Christian consciousness, and that the Christian con- 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 141 

sciousness of to-day must act backwards to throw 
light and interpretation upon the consciousness of 
men, and its organic forms in the days gone by. 
The past is the childhood of theology, a noble child- 
hood, not to be stoned or covered with mud, but 
not on the other hand to be the whole sum and 
substance of our knowledge when God has been 
speaking through thousands of years, and revealing 
more and higher forms of truth to us. 1 do not 
mean catechetical truth, not speculative truth ; I 
do not set myself up above the schools — the Calvin- 
istic school, the Arminian school, or any other of 
them. I look upon them as adapted to the work of 
their day, and they did it well ; and Calvinism I 
hold to be one of the most marvellous results of the 
action of the human mind, and it only needs 
to be true to be one of the stateliest things in 
the world. I do not find fault with it, but it was 
relative to the time. Now relative to our times 
there ought to be a nobler conception of Christ ; 
there ought to be a nobler conception of what God 
thinks of the individual man, who sees eternity in 
him and immortality in him, and man associated 
and man unfolded. There is a vast tract of yet un- 
organised theology springing out of these things, 
and there is no other body of men who ought to be 
so competent to interpret these things as the great 
body of Dissenters in England. We have got no 
Dissenters on our side. We have no towering battle- 
ments of an organised State-Church there, no 
bishops, no priests, no hierarchs to look down on us 
and say, " What are you Dissenters doing down 
there ? " No ; they have to look up to us if they 
want to see us. I have always been glad that I 
heard what Palmerston said, that in the long run 
English politics would follow the Dissenters' con- 
science. Oh, that Dissenters knew what a position 
they were in as pioneers and interpreters. You do 



142 WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 

not need to encompass yourself with the baggage of 
past ecclesiasticism, and I say this, and I say it with 
perfect kindness to the cathedral and to the church 
— the church, not the chapel — the church — when I 
look upon all those things it makes me think of the 
state of Englishmen on the Continent. They 
undertake to travel by packing up the whole of the 
contents of their houses, in order that they may 
have everything abroad just as they have it at home, 
whereas the Yankee will take a carpet bag in his hand 
and go the same road, and be a good deal happier and 
not have a quarter of the trouble. The highly orga- 
nised churches have a vast machinery to lift a pin. 
If they like it — the country is free — if they like it I 
have no objection at all, but if they say that we 
ought to like it, heaven help their brains. Why, we 
take a little country village, build a Congregational 
Church in it and do as much labour as six of them, 
and without half the instrumentality and machinery. 
I suppose that in the State Church of England there 
are fifty men looking after a thing that one country 
pastor could look after just as well as the whole of 
them. It is artificial muss, a vast amount of stuff. 
I do not speak in disrespectful language, but they 
make trouble, and design circuitous ways and mul- 
tiply functions that are not necessary, and they have 
some men to look after them. I think of it when I 
go on your railroads. They are beyond all praise 
for the solidity of their structure. The wondrous 
architecture of their bridges and stations put us 
poor fellows to shame. I feel as if I lived in a barn 
and visited a castle when I look at our system of 
railroads and at yours. There are two things — the 
first and most detestable are the cars that wobble 
all over the road when you go fast, and it is very tire- 
some. Our single cars are as long as fiYe of yours, 
many of them. And in the depot here you have 30 or 
40 porters running round ; one does one thing, another 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 143 

another ; one puts you in your little car and shuts 
the door, and runs on to the next one and the next 
one ; but in America, we have one great station, with 
a line of cars and not a porter to be seen anywhere. 
People go and get into the cars themselves ; they 
are abundantly competent to do it too. We have 
trained our people to take great care of themselves, 
and we do not want a superfluity of porters, and of 
agents and men to do that for us, at an inconvenience 
to us, that we might do better for ourselves. If a 
man wants to go to San Francisco, he takes his 
trunks, and carries his carpet bag in his hand, and 
gets in and puts them on board the baggage car, as 
we call it, and brings out a check, and puts the check 
in his pocket, and he never need think any more 
about it until he gets to his hotel in San Francisco, 
and in ten minutes he finds his trunk there, and he 
has had no trouble. We take care of the baggage 
and let the folks take care of themselves. Now, 
it seems to me that not only do I live in pro- 
found sympathy with the ideal Congregationalism, 
believing it to be the purest, the simplest, the best 
equipped for the work that is to be done in this 
world, because it has so little machinery, because it 
relies so much on the individualism to which its 
men are trained ; but I hold it has gone through a 
period of reaction from bondage, and has come down 
now, it seems to me, in the providence of God, to 
that period in which it has to do its greatest work in 
the future. I believe it to be the advanced guard of 
the great army of God. If you do not know the 
power of associated individualism, the power of 
education in religion, of making each man educated 
to his own functions, and then bringing those men 
together into church association, which church is 
abundantly competent to take care of itself and its 
members, without asking any other church to assist, 
except as a neighbour to advise upon some difficult 



144 WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 

matter; if you lust after the leeks and onions of 
Egypt ; if you cast an eye to it and say : " Oh, if we 
were only a part of the State Church " — as some 
good men among you do ; if in the great coming 
disruption that is as sure to take place as the sun is 
to rise and go down, if you have forgotten the ordi- 
nation with which you were ordained, the baptism 
with which you were baptized, and whisper when 
you should speak out aloud, and pipe when you 
should trumpet ; if in this great battle in which the 
Church of England is itself to be liberated, and to 
come to a power that she has never had before, you 
do not do your duty, the blame will be upon you. 
When I think of the noble line of the theologians of 
the State-Established Church; when I think of the 
heroic men that are upon her lists ; when I think 
how much we have had from them, God forbid that 
I should cast a stone at that great organisation of 
Christian men. Though I may not believe in their 
organisation I believe in their history, and I believe 
in their saints, and I believe in the imperishable litera- 
ture of religion which they have left to us, and I would 
never, never hurt a hair of the head of that great 
communion ; but I believe in my very soul that she 
has not yet touched the limit of her power, that her 
eyes are holden, and that although there are many 
difficulties in disestablishment, when once it shall 
have been effected, and ten years shall have rolled 
around after a complete separation between Church 
and State, of all men who will be enthusiastic for the 
separation they will be who now oppose it most 
strongly. In this work you have a part. It is for 
you to make the public sentiment, — not to make a 
quarrel nor an assault, but to fill the air with that 
temperament which shall enable this work to go on 
naturally and easily. Lecky, in his History of Civili- 
sation, — one book that you all need to read, — show T s 
that men's beliefs are not purely individual, but that 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 145 

they are part and parcel of the air of the generation 
in which they live, and that a change in the method 
of evidence will bring down without controversy, 
without any sort of elaboration, multitudes of things 
that you could not disprove, and about which ages 
have fought. The great changes in theology have 
been made by a change in the average moral tempera- 
ture of the whole community. If I have done any- 
thing for you it is simply because that which has 
moved you has met with something in me which has 
moved you, and it is the voice and heart of God throb- 
bing in the whole community that shall make your 
powers, and not controversial elements, but that 
steadfast testimony for liberty in the churches and 
for power in the local churches against great organisa- 
tions, national, coherent, and so to a certain extent 
stiff in the joints and slow in movement. I do not 
mean by Congregational churches only those that 
are technically so. The Baptists are the best Con- 
gregationalists in our country. Their church 
government is the simplest and most complete 
organisation of the principle of the individuality of 
the local church, and all that believe in that form of 
church government, sweet-minded, Christ-like, but 
felt throughout the whole community, plead for a 
better development of religious life in church 
organisation than the hierarchical system has given, 
and I believe you will be moved to that work, and 
to every step you are taking we shall strongly 
respond on our side. Now, brethren, not to weary 
you with a long discourse, I wish to repeat to you 
what I have said a multitude of times in the long 
course of addresses which I have given to popular 
audiences in England. The day has come when the 
nations should be tied together by a higher spirit than 
that of selfishness or national peculiarities. The 
day has come and the occasion has come. Great 
Britain has been going through a training that 



146 WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 

has prepared her for one part of this great 
movement. America has been going through 
a training that has prepared her for a 
part also in this great movement. England is send- 
ing out her colonies all over the habitable globe ; 
we send out no colonies, because we have not 
population enough yet for our own vast territory. 
Canada is as the United States : the difference is in 
names and not in things. Here is this great body 
now distributed by the providence of God all over 
the world — east and west, and north and south — 
holding substantially the noblest sentiments of 
religion, and of patriotism, and of liberty that have 
been developed in the w T hole history of this world. 
We possess the spirit of liberty, we possess the 
spirit of profound religious conviction, we are trained 
together in the life of self-denial, which is the 
highest joy which can be known to mankind ; we 
are a missionary people, we are a manufacturing 
people, and sometimes our missionaries carry out 
goods that are not best for the morality of the 
heathen nations. Nevertheless, even commerce, 
with all the selfishness that is inherent in it, is the 
dynamite by which the tunnels have been blasted 
thiough, and the valleys filled, and the high hills 
blown down ; it is in many respects the John the 
Baptist that precedes the Christ. You in England, 
and we in America, should make between ourselves 
for peace in every relation. I feel bound to say that 
we are the transgressors at this time more than you 
are, and by the necessities of war, and afterwards by 
the architect of selfishness, we have built up a great 
Chinese wall of exclusion between ourselves and all 
the rest of the world in commerce. The devil's 
own kingdom I call it as regards a nation is in the 
Customs-room ; as regards individuals, it is in the 
liver. But we are working at that, and certainly shall 
beat it down. I have been making fight all my life for 



WELCOME AT LIVEEPOOL. 147 

liberty of conscience, for liberty of speech, for liberty 
in Church matters, for liberty with regard to slaves, 
and my last great battle is for liberty in commerce, 
and I shall live, I am sure, to see it. It is that that 
keeps me young, for when I shall have seen that, I 
shall be willing, like Moses, to stand on the neigh- 
bouring mount, and see the tribes go over into the 
promised land. The bonds that connect us, dear 
brethren, are not those that are esteemed nor 
thought of among men, but as God looks there is 
no such bond of connection as that which recog- 
nises the supremacy of Christ, the power of love, 
and the great work of self-devotion to the propaga- 
tion of love among all mankind ; love that cleanses 
men from sin — for that is the Divine cleansing — 
love that lifts us above time and death and makes 
us heritors of immortality. I thank you for your 
kind attention. 

Rev. Charles A. Berry (Wolverhampton) rose to move a 
vote of thanks to Mr. Beecher for his presence and address. He 
said : I do not know to what I owe this invitation from the 
chair, except that I have cheerfully travelled a long distance 
to be present on this occasion. Not only with great cordiality, 
but w T ith the accompaniment of feelings too deep for words, do 
I consent to be the spokesman of your grateful appreciation. 
Mr. Beecher's address has been a great intellectual and spiritual 
inspiration, but to have seen him and to have come under the. 
magnetic spell of his creative presence has been even a greater 
boon to us. The man is more and better than the speech. To 
have felt the kindling influence of contact with him is a more 
stirring inspiration than merely to have listened to his words. 
There are men whose simple presence creates an atmosphere in 
which it is impossible to think mean thoughts or to take narrow 
views ; in which one unconsciously rises to the higher reaches 
of the mind and the spirit. Mr. Beecher is one of those meii, 
and, if I rightly interpret you through myself, our greatest in- 
debtedness to-day is for this soul- uplifting of which we have been 
made conscious. But we are also truly thankful for the address 
itself, and especially for that part of it in which Mr. Beecher 
rendered absolutely clear his relation to theology. Some of us 
did not require to be told that Mr. Beecher has never committed 
himself to a position of antagonism as against theology in the 



148 WELCOME AT LIYEEPOOL. 

abstract, but only against those current theologies which, how- 
ever heroic and inspiring in their own day, are not now an ade- 
quate statement of the truth as we see it. A man who thinks 
on Divine things must perforce think himself into the possession 
of a theology. For my own part I am not afraid of the word 
theology, not even of systematic theology. Indeed, in my judg- 
ment, the great need of our broader modern Christianity is the 
constructed and stately expression of itself in a theology adequate 
to its visions and its hopes — not for the purpose of authoritative 
imposition, but to stand as symbol of our progress, and to act as 
intellectual base of a new spiritual structure. ISTo man in his 
senses will deny that Calvinism as a system stands unparalleled 
for its impressive intellectual harmony. And no man whose 
judgment is worth considering, but will admit that upon Cal- 
vinism, as upon other expressed intellectual systems, spiritual 
life has erected itself into a vigorous and robust force. What 
we require is not to be content with attacking theologies, but to 
replace them by a theology which shall give intellectual state- 
ment to our chaster views of God. And it is to me a great 
gratification to hear Mr. Beecher say that not only would he 
welcome such a theology, but would even contribute to its creation. 
I am not sure that Mr. Beecher need give himself much alarm 
in regard to what he deems the danger of English Independency, 
the danger of compensating our lack of a well-compacted 
ecclesiastical unity by some sort of authorised creed-unity. Of 
course, the danger of all democracies, political as well as 
ecclesiastical, is to seek at some point a deliverance from the 
responsibilities of self-reliance and self-help, and we in England 
have before now seen a free ecclesiasticism taking refuge in a 
theological strong tower. But that, if I rightly see things, is 
not our danger to-day. There is a difference between American 
and English Independency. It sometimes seems to us that 
American Congregationalism is a sort of unbaptized, un- 
christened Presbyterianism. Auyway, Mr. Beecher and 
Plymouth Church come much nearer to our English ideal of 
Congregationalism than many of the men and churches in the 
States with whose names and good works we are all familiar. 
Nevertheless, the word of caution is a friendly word, and it will 
have its fruit if it moves us to carefulness that, while 
seeking earnestly a scientific theology of our larger faith, 
we do not allow ic to become a refuge of intellectual 
idleness or an armed tower of authoritative fulminations. 
Brethren, the address to which we have listened presents a 
series of tempting topics for thought and discussion, not least 
among them Mr. Beecher's spiritual method of dealing with 
the question of Disestablishment ; but I must forebear. In his 
closing sentences our distinguished guest gave us the secret of 



WELCOME AT LIVERPOOL. 149 

his perpetual youthf illness. It lies in the possession of a cause 
worth living for and worth struggling for. "We of the Christian 
ministry have surely a cause of that quality. May we be found 
so possessed by it as to exhibit according to our degree the 
heroic tenacity of purpose blended with the gracious spirit of 
patience so markedly embodied in our visitor of to-day ! We 
are glad to have seen and spoken with him. We shall remember 
to-day and feel its impulse in days to come. May God spare 
Mr. Beecher's life through many years of growing service, and 
before he goes home may he see rising everywhere around him 
a generation of men animated by the fortitude and vigour of 
our Puritan fathers, and breathing the spirit of that tenderer 
grace which rises out of a diviner conception of God in Christ 1 



RECEPTION IN BELFAST. 



In connection with the visit of Mr. Beecher to Belfast, a 
very interesting meeting was held on Wednesday, October 20, in 
the Lombard Hall, a hall belonging to the central offices of the 
Irish Temperance League. A number of ministers of various 
denominations, knowing that the distinguished American 
preacher was about to visit Belfast, met and resolved to invite 
him and Mrs. Beecher to breakfast. The gathering was of a 
semi-private character, and consisted of both ladies and gentle- 
men, of ministers and laymen. Rev. J.. Fordyce (Congrega- 
tional) presided ; on his right sat Mrs. Beecher, and on his 
left Mr. Beecher. Rev. J. D. Powell (Wesleyan) asked a 
blessing, after which the party, to the number of some eighty 
or ninety, did ample justice to the good things provided. 
Breakfast over, the Chairman said he had to explain to their 
distinguished guests why they were there, and what they were 
there for, and he thought the best way he could do this was 
to do it now. They were there in evidence of their 
common love of Jesus Christ, to offer heartfelt respect to him 
as a public teacher and a man who has worked heartily for his 
fellow-men. Some of them signed creeds and some of them, 
like Mr. Beecher, did not sign any creeds ; some had short 
creeds, and some long ; but they were not there for the sake of 
any creed. They were there to give him and Mrs. Beecher 
a hearty reception, and to wish them God speed on their noble 
work for the good of man. They felt it a great pleasure to 
meet Mr. Beecher there that morning. Some of them were 
acquainted with his books, some of them with his sermons, 
and one gentleman was acquainted with his excellence as a 
novelist. They honoured him as a man of genius, they 
honoured him as a distinguished preacher, but they honoured 
him far more — and he believed it was the kind of honour to 
which Mr. Beecher would most heartily respond — they 
honoured him as a brother man. If they examined him 



EECEPTION IN BELFAST. 151 

through and through they would find a heart full of humanity, 
and it was on this account they gathered around him and Mrs. 
Beecher that morning, to pray that long life and prosperity 
would be theirs. For the last fifty years Mr. Beecher had 
been one of the great moral forces of the Continent of America, 
and, indeed, of the world, and they offered him a cordial 
welcome as the great English speaking man who had done 
so much for their race all over the world, and their earnest 
prayer was that he might long be spared to teach the people 
wisdom ; that he might long be spared, not only to his own 
people, but to the whole living world, as one of the greatest of 
their preachers and most large-hearted of their public men. In 
the name of all the ladies and gentlemen presnnt he welcomed 
him to the City of Belfast, and they wished him God-speed and 
that he might loug ba spared to teach the people. 

Mr. Beecher then rose and was greeted with the 
heartiest applause. He said : Ladies and gentle- 
men, — I accept with proud satisfaction this testi- 
mony of your kindness and your attention. I have 
some things to say this morning, and to cover a 
good many points. Many of them I shall not say, 
and very likely they are the more important ones, 
because to say them without offence or with any 
success would require more time than I have, or you, 
and therefore I shall have to make a selection. 
Allusion has been made to creeds, and the brethren 
have delicately intimated that I have no creed. I 
have half-a-dozen. I have what I call the mother of 
creeds, and it is one made out for me in the New 
Testament, and which I can subscribe to. Sydney 
Smith said the Thirty-nine Articles were made to be 
subscribed to but not believed, but I subscribe to my 
creed and I believe it, and I have tried all my long- 
life to practise it — it has governed and shaped my 
life. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart, and w T ith all thy mind, and with all thy 
strength." That is the first Article, and the second is 
" Thy neighbour as thyself." There is the creed that 
never was acted up to yet, except by Jesus; and I 
have struggled for it, and therefore I have had to be 



152 RECEPTION IN BELFAST. 

at variance with a good deal of the theology 
that is going. I have had a struggle, and a 
Dig one, with the doctrines in which I was 
brought up, and I have got them mostly under. 
They had to be converted a good deal. I was 
brought up by an orthodox New England father, and 
in a time of great controversy between the Uni- 
tarians and the orthodox, and, sitting at my father's 
table, heard all the differences between the new 
and the old theology. I went through it all, as we 
have to go through chicken-pox and measles, but I 
got over it all, and have enjoyed good health since. 
Afterwards I was cast on the strands in the new 
Western cities forty or fifty years ago, when they 
had all the world contributing to the population — and 
if there were divisions of opinion at home they were 
redoubled out there, where there were more sects 
than the preachers had hairs on their heads — and I 
wished to try the great creed, " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God, and thy neighbour as thyself." And 
if there is any of you who do not know how hard it 
is to carry out this among a miscellaneous people, let 
him go to the far States of America and he will find it 
out. Little by little I established the doctrine of 
love ; and he that would come up to Jerusalem for 
the love of Christ, that man belongs to my sect. 
Now in Belfast you will find it very hard to follow 
me. I love Eoman Catholics. I have no doubt 
that you do, so far as consistent with your feelings. 
I have not the slightest objection to the Pope being 
the Pope to those that want him. I have not the 
slightest objection to the whole amount of historic 
and legendary business and the orders they have in 
the Eoman Church, if there is anybody wants them ; 
but if you put me the question, "Are they neces- 
sary ? " I reply, " Nonsense." But are we to banish 
everything unnecessary out of the world? Why, 
we should be stripped to our skins. Let them have 



EECEPTION IN BELFAST. 153 

them, but not seek to impose them upon anybody- 
else. And so I hold with regard to the other 
churches. The English Church was my mother's 
church. She was born and brought up in it, and if 
there were no other reason, that church would always 
be sacred in my heart and feelings, and if there is 
anybody wants it, let him have it ; but I do not 
want it, and that is reason enough for me. They 
have Unitarians in New England, and a good 
many of them. Now, if there are any Christians, 
I think I have found them among the Unitarians, 
and so I refuse to throw a stone at one of them. 
I became a minister of the Presbyterian Church, 
and studied theology in the Presbyterian seminary 
in Ohio, and spent the most delightful years of my 
life as a Presbyterian clergyman ; still, I could not 
be a Presbyterian, because my maturer reason pre- 
ferred a more simple form of church government. 
And then there was a lion in the way; but I got 
around it and dug under it. I have also found 
some of the best men in the world among 
Quakers. Chiefly among the Methodists I have 
worked in the West. They were a permanent 
sect ; but I loved not Methodism, but Methodists. 
And it so happens that my personal friends are. 
among the Baptist denomination. I am a kind of 
a dry Baptist. I take a dip once in awhile. I 
have a baptismal font under my platform, which 
prevents me from having a dry sermon. But in 
the Plymouth Church, I go not in for immersion ; 
but we go in for baptism in the Spirit, and not in 
the flesh. The initial condition in the Plymouth 
Church is to live in love with the Lord Jesus Christ. 
So we have lived together for fifty years in the most 
turbulent time America has seen. Questions of 
slavery, questions of peace and war, have been 
settled; but there never has been needed in the Ply- 
mouth Church a council of men to make peace* 



154 



RECEPTION IN BELFAST. 



We lived in peace and good-fellowship till twelve 
months ago, when Cleveland was President, and I 
would not go from the Republican party, and my 
church was near blown up ; but we are united once 
more, and I think I may say, with kindness. I am not 
ashamed, but most of them are. "When I came to Ire- 
land, and saw the state of feeling that exists between 
Catholics and Protestants here, I was sorry for you. 
I would not make these remarks except to be faith- 
ful, and they lead to another remark I wanted to 
make. I think we have taken upon ourselves Greek 
and Roman methods in our warfare in this world. 
The Greek was instructed to carry out civilisation 
by force of intellect, not by the strength of love. It 
has been undertaken to govern the Church or the 
world by the power of reason and of conscience 
and fear, and theology has been developed under the 
forces of reason, conscience, and fear, and the result 
of all this is very good indeed ; but, according to my 
knowledge, there never yet has been an endeavour 
to control human life and feeling by Christ Jesus' 
simple doctrine of love ; and then to conform the 
life with it, and interpret it not according to the low 
standard that prevails among men, but to the high 
standard of Jesus Christ. As regards the future of 
theology I believe there is to be one, and it will be 
different from the old. There will be less of state- 
ments of things about which we know nothing, and 
more about what we know by our lives' experience. 
It is coming, and in the near Church of the future 
we shall have a more glorious view of the Divine 
truths. Is there anything in the Westminster Con- 
fession on the subject of love ? I have no doubt there 
is somewhere. An excellent good fellow, a clergy- 
man of the Episcopal Church, though he had been 
brought up a Unitarian, had a high opinion of him- 
self, and one of the lay brethren said of him that when 
he died and was introduced to Paul he would say — 



EECEPTION IN BELFAST. 155 

Paul, I have often introduced your name in my sermons 
in life. The doctrine of love is referred to in many of 
the creeds ; and yet it is the very foundation. There 
is that magnificent speech in the first Epistle to the 
Corinthians, 13th chapter, where Paul says, "If I 
speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and 
have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, 
or a tinkling cymbal." He must have had his eye 
on some of our seminaries. I wish I could stay in 
Ireland to preach. I look upon the troubles that 
are going on with pity and regret. I am a 
Protestant, but I do not shudder at, and am not afraid 
of, a Eoman Catholic. If a man be a Christian, he 
is my brother ; and I have among my friends in life 
many Eoman Catholics, and love letters — if one man 
may indeed write a love letter to another — have been 
written to me by clergymen of that community, 
and I will not throw stones at them. You may not 
approve of their worship, their doctrines, and all 
that they do, but I say, let them have the same liberty 
as myself. I honour them so far as they represent 
Jesus Christ, and there I leave them. And so it is 
with regard to the Protestant denominations. I am 
here as a member of them all. I can say I belong 
to them all. I am a Baptist all except baptism; I am 
a Quaker except the doctrine and practice; and I am 
a Unitarian whenever they put out towards para- 
dise ; and I am a Presbyterian. You see how all can 
be contained in a small body like myself. Love is 
capacious, and can hold a great deal. That is my love 
to which I have stuck through all vagaries and changes, 
love for Jesus Christ, and the wish to go and save the 
world by the power of love, and not as the churches 
have been trying to save it by theology and worship, 
but by love. I wanted to express the very great 
sympathy I feel with the things going on in Great 
Britain. I am an Englishman born in America. 
No man can imagine how the American feels 



156 EECEPTION IN BELFAST. 

towards the mother land. Blood is stronger than 
water or wine, and we have a hearty recognition of 
Great Britain when we are not quarrelling with her. 
We have a reasonable conceit of our excellencies, 
and that shows where we came from. We think 
that America represents the best British elements 
planted out in a larger field than there is here at 
home ; and still there are many things in Great Britain 
I should like to see in America, and some I should 
not. But great changes are about to happen in 
Great Britain — great changes, that if they happen 
suddenly will be revolutionary, but happening slowly 
will be a blessing. In America there is not a man so 
poor that he cannot have his children educated with- 
out one penny of expense. In America, the common 
people are made intelligent, and the sovereignty is 
in the whole community, so as to bring the government 
nd the common people together in perfect sympathy. 
We have classes as you have, but the honours are 
mutable and transmutable. The best men go to the 
top, not always morally considered, but when a man 
has fulfilled his trust and dies his sous are not always 
fit to carry it on and they go down. The circulation 
from top to bottom is remarkable, and you find men 
of the same families go different ways. You have an 
institution that keep a man in it whether or not he be 
fit to remain there. Now, I am not at enmity with 
the aristocracy of Great Britain. I suppose among 
them you will find many of the noblest specimens of 
man on the face of the earth. And taken as an 
order, if it were a private thing, and were such as you 
have it you would have no reason to be ashamed, 
because it is only now and again you have any 
of the peers to be ashamed of. But there is 
another thing — the land question. I have been 
going to a deal of trouble about the land. The 
Marquis of Somebody or Something holds a whole 
section of London — it is on lease. Once we 



RECEPTION IN BELFAST. 157 

had a little of that. In the early days of the 
colonists large grants of land were allotted to 
them which were held as manors with manorial 
rights, but the community desired they should not 
become an entailment of theirs, and there was such 
feeling that they had to be broken up, the State 
making compensation, and now there is not a 
manorial right in the States. But the thing has 
been done peaceably, and there is no lease except 
some sections in New York, and they are the least 
profitable. I look on these great holdings of land, 
no matter how entailed, as part of a bad policy. 
It is a policy against the common people, and 
the bone, sinew, and success of Great Britain 
have been largely derived from her common people. 
I hold you are on the eve of great changes, I 
hope not revolutionary. You have our sympathy, 
but you cannot expect an American to fall in 
with the condition of land prevailing in England 
and Ireland. Men have asked me, Are you a 
Home Ruler? "Well, I am, at home. I believe 
in the common people of any State. "We have 
forty States, and every one of them has its own 
State legislation. We have two Governments, the 
Federal and the local or State's Government. Save 
in what appertains to the affairs of all the States 
there is no notice taken by the Federal Government. 
Everything that belongs to any particular State in 
its individuality is dealt with by that State, and the 
Federal Government does not touch it. The laying 
of railways, making and laying of bridges, are carried 
out solely by the State, say of Massachusetts or of 
Connecticut, in which I was born ; and everything 
relating to diplomacy, to peace or war, belongs to 
the Federal Government. The same men sit in 
both Governments. Now that it comes to the 
question of Home Rule, I came, whether with 
prejudices or wisdom, to this country, and I came 



158 KECEFTION IN BELFAST. 

in favour of the local government of the people who 
live in it. Then you ask me, What are you going 
to do ? And I say, Thank God I don't live here. 
Of what I see going on in Ireland — I say it is a 
shame. Then, when you throw in Scotland and 
Wales, I say this is getting too thick for me, and 
I am no statesman, and I am not going to determine 
this matter. While going thus far, I am in favour of 
the promotion of the well-being of the common 
people. My American notion of political economy 
would work freedom out of this : You must make the 
poor intelligent. It will not do to give the suffrage 
to ignorance and brutality, and still less to keep it 
away from them. The dangerous citizen is the man 
without responsibility. The way to teach a man 
to vote is to let him vote ; the way to teach a man 
archery is to let him shoot ; to look at a match will 
never teach him to shoot. The Irish were the first 
great irruption of emigrants upon us as soon as our 
fathers had settled down. And they were a great 
trouble to us. I remember that we had great 
prejudices against the Irish ; they were not used to 
us and we were not used to them. They came over 
increasing in numbers, and some of them died off 
and some of them remained and improved. The 
Irish people are the worst people to crush in ; but 
the moment we take them over on our side 
whisky kills them or liberty makes them good 
children. All you have to do is to season the 
emigrant. In Connecticut the Catholic Church grows 
stronger and stronger every day, and the Catholics 
are the most reputable citizens ; they are anxious for 
education, and are doing well for us ; and what's 
true of them is true of the German. And we have 
emigrants coming from as far east as China ; 
they do not drink whisky and do not chew 
tobacco, and they are more industrious ; and a 
Chinaman can no more understand the Irish- 



EECEPTION IN BELFAST. 159 

man's shillelagh than he can his language. We 
have got a great deal to go through on our side to 
get liberty for the commercial classes. We have 
one thing ; we have bound our arms with manacles, 
and built along the line of our coast what I call 
the devil's own fortifications — custom houses. It is 
an unchristian policy ; it separates men instead of 
drawing them together, and it will go down, and 
I will help its going down. So, then, on our side we 
may be considered bumptious Yankees. We have 
our failings, it is true ; but one thing you had better 
remember, we had faith in our birth-right. When 
an educated American comes to Great Britain the 
air is full of sympathy, and no Englishman can feel 
in England like as I feel. When I look from another 
point of view and see the grandeur of this Empire, 
and its strength and power, and the unity of 
the language of its people, I say all this is the 
working of Providence ; and there is the hand of 
the Lord pointing to these people. And cursed be 
the man that throws discord into the ranks of the 
common-speaking people. Inspired by the higher 
views of theology, let us come near our Divine 
Master and see that God has made a people of 
His own right hand, who, not for selfishness, or 
political ambition, or cruelty, shall take possession 
of the earth, and in the name of humanity and its 
Master, our Lord Jesus Christ, for His glory and 
the welfare of mankind. I thank you for the feeling 
of kindness you have shown to us. 

At the close of Mr. Beecher's address, which was 
enthusiastically received, Kev. George Cron (Evangelical 
Union) moved a very hearty vote of thanks to their distin- 
guished guests for so kindly accepting their invitation, and to 
Mr. Beecher for his suggestive, eloquent, and characteristic 
address. Mr. Cron spoke of his familiarity with Mr. Beecher's 
life and work, of his confidence in his Christian character, of 
the benefit he had received from his published works, and, 
above all, of the pleasure he experienced in meeting with him 



160 RECEPTION IN BELFAST. 

on tbis interesting occasion. Mr. Cron concluded an eloquent 
and eulogistic speech by wishing Mr. and Mrs. Beecher long 
life and happiness, and a prosperous voyage to New York. Rev. 
B. Workman, B.D. (Presbyterian), seconded the vote of thanks. 
He referred to the great pleasure it had been to them all to see 
and hear and talk to Mr. Beecher, of whom they had heard 
and read so much. As to what Mr. Beecher had said about 
the Westminster Confession, he thought they would all agree 
with one article of that venerable document — we believe that all 
churches may err. His own belief was, and all Reformed 
Churches professed, at least, to accept this doctrine, that all 
who really repented of sin or believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, 
whether they called themselves Catholics, Episcopalians, 
Unitarians, or by any other name, really belonged to the Holy 
Catholic Church. The Chairman having put the resolution to 
the meeting, it was passed by acclamation. Mr. Beecher, in a 
few words, gratefully referred to the compliments paid to his 
wife, and thanked the meeting for their great kindness to 
himself. He then bade them farewell. Mr. Fordyce, after a 
few words expressive of thankfulness for the beautiful spirit that 
had pervaded the meeting, then called upon Mr. Beecher to 
pronounce the Benediction. At the close a large number of 
those present were introduced t > Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, and 
many of the ministers especially thanked the famous Brooklyn 
preacher for the inspiration he had given them in their work. 
Only one feeling was expressed by all, and this was that they 
had felt it a great privilege to take part in such a spontaneous 
and hearty tribute of respect for Mr. Beecher. 



LECTURES. 



THE REIGN OF THE COMMON 
PEOPLE. 



THE noise (said Mr. Beecher, referring to the 
loud applause with which he was greeted) 
Tery vividly recalls twenty-three years ago, al- 
though it is of a very different kind to what 
it was then. Twenty-three years in a man's 
life corrects a great many hasty impressions, gives 
more solidity and more sagacity of judgment. When 
I look back upon all the things that happened at 
nnd before the time that I was here, I can scarcely 
reproach the English people for their misjudgment 
of the meaning of that great issue which God was 
trying by the arbitrament of the sword. It is not 
strange. At that time the thought, the feeling, the 
institutions, the tendency, the genius of the American 
people were very little known abroad; they are 
better understood now ; and, notwithstanding the 
temporary and not unnatural irritation which pre- 
vailed when England was neutral, to say the least, 
with the passing away of that cloud a better feeling 
prevails everywhere. The pride of heritage comes 
to every generous American bosom ; we are a younger 
oak than you aie, but you bore the acorns which 
were planted for us, and we are of your lineage and 



a THE REIGN OF 

of your blood, and if you are not proud of us we 
will make you so before we have done. 

Light Without Illumination. 
It has been the effect of modern investigation to 
throw light without illumination upon the most in- 
teresting period of human history. "When the old 
chronology prevailed, and it was thought that this 
world was built about six thousand years ago, men 
had of necessity one way of looking at things ; but 
now it is agreed upon all hands that we cannot 
count the chronology of this world by thousands, 
more likely by millions of years. Nor was the sys- 
tem of immediation in creation which prevailed 
at the time favourable to the discovery of truth. 
God who dwells in eternity has time enough to build 
worlds which require millions of years, and what- 
ever may be the cause of the origin of the human 
race, and I have my own opinion on that subject — 
confidential, however— I think it may be said that 
the earliest appearance of man upon earth was in 
the savage condition. He began as low down as he 
could and be a man rather than an animal, and the 
question of profound interest is one that can pro- 
bably never be answered except by guess, and guess 
is not philosophy altogether. How did man emerge 
from that savage condition ? There were then no 
schools, no churches, no prophets, no priests, no 
books, presses — nothing ; wild tribes in the wild 
wilderness, how did they come towards civilisation? 
You say that the first industries were those that 
supplied appetite — food, shelter, clothing. That is, 
doubtless, true, although we only infer it ; but how 
did the brain which is the organ of the man begin 
to unfold, not the simple knowledge that lay close in 
the neighbourhood of every man, but how did it 
come to build institutions, found communities; and 
develop them, till now the human race in civilised 
countries are as far removed from their ancestors as 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 3 

their ancestors were from the animals below them ? 
It is on this broad field that light falls, but not illu- 
mination. But later down, supposing that industries 
were educators, supposing that men were educated 
by war itself, by combinations required by skill and 
leadership, by ten thousand forms of growing social 
life, by the love of property, the instinct that is 
fundamental to human nature — suppose that all this 
indirectly evolved the intelligence of the human 
family, how do we come at length to the period in 
which the unfolding of the hidden powers of the 
human soul became an object of direct instruction? 

Primitive Development, 

The earliest attempt to develop men, on purpose, 
was in Egypt, so far as we know. The Egyptian 
school has all the marks in it of antiquity and of 
primitive development, for it was limited" in the 
numbers admitted and limited in the topics taught. 
Only the royal family could go to the schools of 
Egypt. That included, of course, the priesthood; 
and putting aside some slight mathematical teaching 
it is probable that mysteries and superstitions were 
the whole subjects taught, and that mainly to teach 
men how to be hierarchs or rulers of some sort. 
When we cross over the sea to Greece, at a period 
much later, though how much we know not, we find 
that schools had developed, and that the idea of 
making more of men than natural law makes -of 
them, or the casual influences of human society^ 
the attempt directly to train intelligence and to pro- 
duce knowledge was farther advanced, for anybody 
could go to a Greek school that had the means to 
pay — anybody but slaves and women ; they trained 
very near together in antiquity, and they are not 
quite far enough apart yet. And yet I am bound to 
correct myself when I say that women were not privi- 
leged ; they were. It is probable that in no period 



4 THE EEIGN OF 

of human history has more pains "been taken with 
the education of women than was taken in Greece ; 
in all their accomplishments, in learning, in music r 
in the dance, in poetry, in literature, in history, in 
philosophy, even in statesmanship, women were very 
highly educated, provided they were to live the lives> 
of courtesans. The fact is simply astounding that 
in the age of Pericles intelligence and accomplish- 
ments were associated with impudicity, and were the 
signs of it, and that ignorance and modesty were 
associated ideas. If a woman would have the credit 
of purity and uprightness in social relations she 
must he the drudge of the household, and if any 
woman radiant in personal beauty and accomplished , 
fitted for conversation with statesmen and philoso- 
phers appeared, it was taken for granted that she- 
was accessible. 

Women Preachers. 

We have a side-light thrown on this subject 
in the New Testament, not well understood 
hitherto. That noble old Jewish book, the Bible, 
reveals a higher station to womanhood in the 
ancient Israelitish days than in any other Oriental 
land, and from the beginning of the Old Testament 
to the end of it there is no limitation of a woman's 
rights, her functions and her position. She actually 
was public in the sense of honour and function ; 
she went with unveiled face if she pleased ; she 
partook of religious services and led them ; she was 
a judge, she was even a leader of armies ; and you 
shall not find, either in the Old Testament or in the 
New, one word that limits the position of a woman 
till you come to the Apostle's writings about Grecian 
women, for only in Corinthians and in the writings. 
of Paul to Timothy, who was the Bishop of the 
Greek Churches in Asia Minor, do you find any 
limitation made. Knowing full well what this public 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 5 

sentiment was, Paul said : " Suffer not a woman to 
teach in your assemblies, let your women keep 
silence." Why? because all, in that corrupt public 
sentiment, looking upon intelligent teachers in the 
Christian Church would have gone away and said : 
4 * It is all done of licentiousness, women are teach- 
ing ; " and in a public sentiment that associated in- 
telligence and immorality it is not strange that, 
prudentially and temporarily, women were restrained. 
But that has all gone, woman has risen, not only in 
intelligence but is the universal teacher, not alone in 
the household but in the school, not alone in com- 
mon schools but in every grade, till she has attained 
professorships in universities and even presidency in 
women's colleges — at least in our land. She is the 
right hand of the charities of the church ; she walks 
unblushing with an unveiled face where men do 
walk ; and she is not only permitted in the great 
orthodox churches of New England to speak in 
meeting, but when they send her abroad, ordained to 
teach the Gospel to the heathen, there she is per- 
mitted to preach, and when they come home women 
may still teach in a hall, but not in a church, and 
dear old men there are yet so conservative that they 
are reading through golden spectacles their Bibles, 
and saying : " I suffer not a woman to preach." 

Light Out of Darkness. 

We hardly can trace the unfolding of human intelli- 
gence after it plunged into that twilight or darkness 
of the Middle Ages. Then w T e begin to find intelli- 
gence developed through mechanical guilds, and in 
various ways of commerce ; but schools such as we 
now understand schools to be are very imperfectly 
traced out in the Middle Ages. But when that new 
impulse came to the moral nature, and the civil 
nature, and the intellectual and philosophical nature, 



6 THE EEIGN OF 

to art, literature, to learning — when the Informa- 
tion came, whose scope was not ecclesiastical alone 
by any means — it was a resurrection of the human in- 
telligence throughout its whole vast domain — schools 
began again to appear to be, as John Milton says, 

Eaked embers out of the ashes of the past, 

and they began to glow again. And from that time 
on, the progress of the efforts to develop by actual 
teaching human intelligence grows broader, brighter, 
and more effectual down to our present day, and to- 
day in the principal nations of Europe education is 
compulsory, the education not of favoured classes, 
not of the children of the wealthy, not of those that 
have inherited genius, but the children of the com- 
mon people. It is held that it is unsafe for a state 
to raise ignorant men. Ignorant men are like bombs, 
which are a great deal better to be shot into an 
enemy's camp than to be kept at home, for where 
an ignorant man goes off he scatters desolation, and 
it is not safe to have ignorant men, for an ignorant 
man is an animal, and the stronger his passions and 
the feebler his conscience and intellect, the more 
dangerous he is. Therefore, for the sake of the 
commonwealth, our legislators wisely, w T hether they 
be Eepublican institutions or Monarchical institu- 
tions, or aristocratical institutions, have at last 
joined hands on one thing — that it is best to edu- 
cate the people's children, from the highest to the 
lowest everywhere. 

A Great Uprising. 
And what, in connection with various other 
general causes, has been the result of this un- 
folding of intelligence among the common people ? 
It has not yet gone down to the bottom; there 
is a strata of undeveloped intelligence among 
the nations of Europe certainly ; I am not speak- 
in g now of the residuum that falls down from the 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 7 

top like the slime of the ocean, but of those who 
are reasonable and honest and virtuous and useful. 
It may be said that, as the sun touches the tops of 
the mountains first and works its way downward 
through the valley later and later in the day, so 
there is very much to be done in Europe yet to bear 
knowledge and intelligence, which is better than 
knowledge, to the lowest classes of the common 
people. But even in this condition, what has been 
the result in Europe of the education of the common 
people? All those heavings, all those threatened 
revolutions, all those civil and commercial develop- 
ments that are like the waves of the sea, are spring- 
ing from the fact that God in His providence has 
thrown light and intelligence upon the great under- 
mass of society ; and the under-parts of society, less 
fortunate in every respect than those that are ad- 
vanced, are seeking room to develop themselves ; 
they are seeking to go up, and no road has been 
found along which they can travel as yet. I do 
not believe in Nihilism in Eussia. If I had been 
born and brought up there and had felt the heel on 
my neck, I would have been a Nihilist. I am poor 
stuff to make an obedient slave out of ! Neverthe- 
less, they are like blind men trying to find their way 
into the open air, and if they stumble or go into 
wrong departments, are they to be derided and 
cursed? — because they are seeking to construct a 
government after they shall have destroyed govern- 
ment and made a wilderness, are they, because they 
are doing the best they know how — are they, there- 
fore, to be cursed? — pitied, better directed, emanci- 
pated ? When they come to America to teach us 
how to make commonwealths we think they are 
out of place, decidedly. Well, that is our trait. 
We thank Europe for a great deal — for literature, 
;ancient and modern ; we thank Europe for teachers 
in art, in colour, in form, in sound, we are grateful 



8 THE EEIGN OF 

for all these things ; but when the Socialists of Ger- 
many, and the Communists of France, and the 
Nihilists of Russia come to teach us how to reor- 
ganise human society, they have come to the wrong- 
place. Their ignorance is not our enlightenment. 

The Way Up. 
The main cause of all this, the cause of causes,, 
lies in the swelling of the intelligence of the great, 
hitherto neglected, and ignorant masses of Europe ; 
they are seeking elevation, they are seeking a larger 
life, and as men grow in intelligence life must grow 
too. "When a man is an animal, he does not want 
much except straw and fodder; hut when a man 
begins to be a rational and intelligent creature, he 
wants a good deal more than the belly asks ; for 
reason wants something, taste needs something, 
conscience needs something, every faculty brought 
into ascendancy and power is a new hunger, and 
must be supplied. No man is so cheap as the 
brutal, ignoiant man ; no man can rise up from the 
lower stations of life and not need more for his sup- 
port from the fact that he is civilised and 
Christianised, and although he may not have 
it individually, the community must supply it 
for him. He must have resources of know- 
ledge, he must have means of refinement, he 
must have limitations of taste or he feels himself 
slipping back ; and as I look upon the phenomena 
of society in Europe it is the phenomena of God 
calling to the great masses of a growingly en- 
lightened people, " Come up," and they are saying,. 
" Which way ? By what road ? How ? " And they 
must needs pass through the experiment of igno- 
rance, tentative ignorance, and failure in a thousand 
things — they must pass through these preliminary 
stages, for as it was necessary when they came out 
of the bondage of Egypt that the children of Israel 
should go through the wilderness for forty years, so 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. <> 

all people have to go forty years and more through 
the wilderness of mistake, through the wilderness 
of trials and attempts that fail; and it may be 
said, indeed, that the pyramid of permanent 
society is built up on blocks of blunders, and it 
is mistakes that have pointed out the true way 
to mankind. Now what has taken place among 
the common people ? Once they thought about their 
own cottage, and their own little steading; they 
have gradually learned to think about the whole 
neighbourhood. Once they were able to look after 
their own limited affairs ; they recognise the com- 
munity of men, and are beginning to think about 
the affairs of other men — as the Apostle said : " Look, 
ye every man on his own things, but also every man- 
on the things of others." They are having a society 
interest among themselves. Once they had limited 
thoughts and bits of knowledge ; now they have the 
mother of knowledge — intelligence ; they are com- 
petent to think, to choose discriminately ; they are 
competent to organise themselves ; they are learning 
that self-denial by which men can work in masses of 
men ; they are beginning to have a light in light 
transcendentally higher than the old contentment of 
the bestial state of miserable labour in miserable? 
Europe. Such are the results, briefly stated, to which 
God in His providence has brought the masses of the 
common people, and the promise of the future is. 
brighter even than the fulfilment of the past. 
"What the issues will be and what the final fruits will 
be God knows and man does not know ! 

American "Go." 
Now, if you cross the sea to our own land, my 
own land, the land of my fathers, we shall find that 
there are influences tending to give power to the 
brain, alertness, quickness, to give to it also a wider 
scope and range than it has in the average of the 
labouring classes in Europe. Here and there are 



10 THE REIGN OF 

communities which, if transplanted on the other 
shore, will scarcely know that they were not born 
and brought up there ; but this is not true of the 
great mass of the common people of all Europe. 
•Our climate is stimulating. Shipmasters tell me 
that they cannot drink in New York as they do in 
Liverpool. Heaven help Liverpool ! There is more 
oxygen in our air. It has some importance in this, 
-that anything that gives acuteness, vivacity, spring, 
to the substance of the brain prepares it for educa- 
tion and larger intelligence. A dull, watery, slug- 
gish brain may do for a Conservative ; but God 
never made them to be the fathers of progress. 
They are very useful as brakes on the wheel down 
hill ; but they never would draw anything up hill 
ill the world. And yet, in the fanatic influence that 
Tfcends to give vitality and quickness, force, and con- 
tinuity to the human brain, lies the foundation for 
the higher style of manhood, and although it is not 
to be considered as a primary and chief cause of 
smartness, if you will allow that word, yet it is one 
among others, And then, when the child is born 
on the other side, he is born into an atmosphere of 
expectation. He is not out of the cradle before he 
learns that he has got to earn his own living ; he is 
hereditarily inspired with the idea of money. Some- 
times, when I see babies in the cradle apparently 
pawing the air, I think that they are making change 
in their own minds of future bargains. But this 
has great force as an educating element in early 
childhood : " You will be poor if you do not exert 
yourself ; " and at every future stage it lies with each 
man what his condition in society is to be. 

The First Mistake. 

This becomes a very powerful developer of the cere- 
bral mass, and from it comes intelligence and power 
of intellect. And then, upside of that, when he goes 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 11 

into life the whole style of society tends towards in- 
tense cerebral excitability. For instance, as to> 
business, I find in London that you may go down at 
nine, o'clock and there is nobody in his office, at ten 
o'clock the clerks are there, at eleven o'clock some 
persons do begin to appear. By that time the 
Yankees have got half through the day. And it 
is in excess ; it is carried to a fault ; for men 
there are ridden by two demons. They desire 
excessive property — I do not know that they 
are much distinguished from their ancestors — 
they desire more than enough for the uses of 
the family, and when a man wants more money 
than he can use, he wants too much. But they 
have the ambition of property, which is accursed, 
or should be. Property may be used in large 
masses to develop property, and co-ordinated estates 
may do work that single estates cannot do ; I am 
not, therefore, speaking of vast enterprises like 
railroads and factories. But the individual man 
thinks in the beginning, " If I could only make 
myself worth a hundred thousand dollars, I should 
be willing to retire from business." Not a bit of it. 
A hundred thousand dollars is only an index of 
five hundred thousand ; and when he has come to 
five hundred thousand he is like Moses — and very 
unlike him — standing on the top of the mountain 
and looking over the promised land, and he says to 
himself, "A million! a million!" and a million 
draws another million, until at last he has more 
than he can use, more than is useful for him, and 
he won't give it away — not till after his death. 
That is cheap benevolence. AYell, this is the first 
element of mistake among large classes of com- 
mercial life in America. 

The Second Mistake. 
The second is, they want it suddenly. They are 
not willing to say, "For forty years I will lay 



12 THE EEIGN OF 

gradually the foundations, and build the golden 
stores one above another." No ; they want grass 
lands. They want to win by gambling, for that is 
gambling when a man wants money without having 
given a fair equivalent for it. And so they press 
nature to her utmost limits till the very diseases 
of our land are changing ; men are dropping dead 
with heart disease ; men are dropping dead — it 
is paralysis ; men are dropping dead — it is Bright's 
■disease. Ah ! it is the violence done to the 
brain by excessive industry, through excessive 
liours, and through excessive ambition, which is 
but another name for excessive avarice. 



Election Excitement. 

But outside of that there is still another excite- 
ment, and that is politics. Now, you in this insular 
and cool climate are never excited in politics at all, 
but we are in our sunshiny land ; especially are we 
so once in four years, when the great quartennial elec- 
tion comes off, and when the most useless thing on 
God's earth is built on God's earth — namely, a poli- 
tical platform, which men never use and never stand 
on after it is once built. Then the candidates are put 
forth, and every newspaper editor, and every public- 
spirited citizen and elector goes before the people 
and declares to them that the further existence of 
the Government depends on the election of both 
parties. Now, nations have a wondrous way of 
continuing to live after they are doomed to death, 
and we contrive to get along from four years to four 
years; nevertheless the excitement is prodigious. 
Men say these wild excitements are not wholesome, 
I say they are the best things that can happen to 
the community. I say the best speeches of the 
community scattered through the land, discussing 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 13 

finance, taxes, education, are the education of the 
common people, and they learn more in a year of 
universal debate than they would in twenty years of 
reading and thinking without such help. 



The Doctrinal Church, 

Well, outside of that there is still another excite- 
ment, and that is in the Church, which is the hottest 
place of all. I do not mean a torrid heat ; I do not 
mean a fuliginous kind of heat ; I mean simply this 
— honest — that, even under its poorest administra- 
tion, religion brings to bear upon the human brain 
the most permanent and the most profound excite- 
ments that are known to humanity. Now, if you 
take denominations as they are now, you could not 
illustrate much by them, for they are mere incidents 
in the history of time, and they are no permanent, 
cohesive, systematic developments. You must 
shuffle the cards and have a new deal for an illus- 
tration, and I divide all Christian denominations 
into three sections : those that work by doctrines ; 
those that work by emotion ; and those that work 
by devotion. The men that work by doctrines are 
men that think they have found out the universe ; 
they have not only got it, but they have formulated 
it ; they know all about the Infinite, they have 
sailed round Eternity, they know all about the 
Eternal and the Everlasting God, and you will 
hear them discuss questions of theology: "Now 
God could not, consistent with consistency, do so- 
and-so." They know all His difficulties; they 
know how He got round them. One might easily 
come to think that God was their next-door neigh- 
bour. Well, after all, whether it is true or false — 
their systematic views, their dogmas — the peda- 
gogic views are very important to teach young and 



14 THE BEIGN OF 

middle-aged and old to attempt, by philosophic 
reasoning, to reach into these unfathomable depths. 
It produces a power upon the brain of most trans- 
cendent importance, and they in their way may not 
increase the sum of human knowledge, but they 
increase the capacity of the human brain for pro- 
found thought and investigation. 

The Emotional Church. 

Then there are the joyous churches, that love 
hallelujahs, songs, hymns — revival churches, Moody 
and Sankey movements, Methodist movements of 
all kinds. I need not undertake to show you that 
this emotion tends to produce cerebral activity, and 
has an educating force in regard to the facility with 
which the brain acts. 

The Devotional Church. 

Then there come those churches that run on 
devotion, formulated prayers, printed services. One 
would not think that stereotyped prayers read in 
the dim light of a painted window would produce 
great conflagration ! Nor, indeed, do they. But 
when you come to the inner life — (A Voice : "We 
cannot hear ") — that was a part I did not want you 
to hear — when you come to look at the interior life 
of these churches, you shall find that their charities, 
their sense of responsibility to the weak and the 
poor and to the ignorant, are perpetually acting as 
an inward fire, and developing intelligence in ways 
not common to the other forms of religious worship. 

Common Schools. 

"Well, what has been the result of all these 
influences which have been superadded to those 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 15 

universal stimuli to which all the civilized world 
outside of our land has been subject? What has 
been the result on our side ? We have 60,000,000 
men, women, and children in America ; we have 
common schools for every living soul that is born on 
that continent — except the Chinese. Now, in the 
States, where twenty-five years ago it was a peni- 
tentiary offence to teach a slave how to read, we are 
sending out a thousand educated coloured teachers 
to teach schools, to practise law and medicine 
through the coloured population of the South ; the 
Government is enlisted in their behalf, and the 
States are proud of their coloured schools that a 
little time ago would have burnt a man who dared 
to advocate the education of the slave. We are the 
harbour to which all the sails of the world crowd 
with emigrants, and we bless God for it. Their 
letters go back thicker than leaves in autumn, to 
those that are left behind ; and we have a vast 
population from Spain, from Portugal, from Italy, 
from Hungary, from Austria, from Germany, from 
Eussia; we have a vast population from all the 
Scandinavian lands, from Scotland, from England, 
and occasionally from Ireland. Let them come ; if 
you don't want them, we do. It takes a little time, 
you know, to get them used to things ; but whenever 
the children of foreign emigrants, of whom we have 
8,000,000 born and bred in our land; whenever 
those children have gone through our common 
schools, they are just as good Americans as if they 
had not had foreign parents. The common schools 
are the stomachs of the Republic, and when a man 
goes in there he comes out, after all, American. 

A Tremendous Experiment. 

Well, now, we are playing the experiment before the 
world on a tremendous scale, and the world does not 



16 THE KEIGN OF 

quite believe in it. I do. They say : "With regard to 
your success in government of the people by the 
people for the people, in the language of the Liturgy, 
you are dependent upon extraneous conditions ; it is 
not philosophically to be inferred from the principles 
of your Government ; you have got so much land, 
wait till the struggle for existence takes place, as in 
the denser populations of Europe, and then you will 
find that self-government will be but flimsy to hold 
men's passions in check, and then, by and by, you 
will go from anarchy to a centralised and strong 
•Government." I do not blame them for thinking 
so. If I had been brought up as they have been, 
perhaps I should think so ; but they do not under- 
stand it ; they do not understand the facts which 
actually are in existence, and are fundamental. 
Por we are not attempting to build Society ; we 
are by Society attempting to build the individual. 
We hold that the State is strong in the proportion in 
which every individual in that State is free, large, 
independent. You have a finer educated upper 
class than we have ; you have nobler and deeper 
scholars in greater numbers than we have ; you have 
institutions compared with which ours are puny; 
you are educating the top, we are educating society 
from the bottom to the top ; we are not attempting 
to lift favoured classes higher ; we are not attempting 
to give to those that already have, we are attempting 
.to put our hands under the foundations of human 
life, and lift everybody up. That is a slower work; 
hut when it is done and its fruits are ripe, you will 
never doubt again which is the wisest and best 
policy. 

A Bepresentative Democracy. 

I do not suppose that if you were to go and look 
upon the experiment of self-government in America, 
you would have a very high opinion of it. I have 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 17 

not either, if I just look on the surface of things. 
"Why, men will say: "It stands to reason that 
60,000,000 ignorant of law, ignorant of constitutional 
history, ignorant of jurisprudence, of finance, and 
taxes and tariffs and forms of currency ; 60,000,000 
people that never studied these things — are not fit to 
rule. Your diplomacy is as complicated as ours, and it 
is the most complicated on earth, for all things grow 
in complexity as they develop towards a higher 
condition. What fitness is there in these people ? 
"Well, it is not democracy merely ; it is a represen- 
tative democracy. Our people do not vote in mass 
for anything ; they pick out captains of thought, 
they pick out the men that do know, and they send 
them to the Legislature to think for them, and then 
the people afterwards ratify or disallow them. 

Defects in the American Legislature. 

But when you come to the Legislature I am bound 
to confess that the thing does not look very much 
more cheering on the outside. Do they really select 
the best men ? Yes ; in times of danger they do 
very generally, but in ordinary time "kissing goes 
by favour." What is that dandy in the Legislature 
for ? His father was an eminent judge, and they 
thought it would be a compliment to the old gentle- 
man to send his son up to the Legislature, not 
because he knows anything, but because his father 
does. It won't do to make too close an inquisition 
as to why people are in legislatures. What is that 
weasel-faced lawyer doing there ? Well, there may 
be ten or twenty gentlemen who wanted legislation 
that would favour their particular property interest 
instead of the commonwealth, and they wanted 
somebody to wriggle a Bill through the Legislature, 
and so he sits for the commonwealth. That gre^t 
blustrous man squeezing on the front seats ; what is 



18 THE EEIGN OF 

he there for ? He ? He could shake hands with 
more mothers, kiss more pretty girls and more 
babies, and tell more funny stories in an hour than 
any other man in a month, and so they send him up 
to make laws. When they get there it would do> 
your heart good just to go and look at them. You 
know what the duty of a regular Republican Demo- 
cratic legislator is. It is to get back again next 
winter. His second duty is what ? His second 
duty is to put himself under that extraordinary 
providence that takes care of legislators' salaries. 
The old miracle of the prophet and the meal and the- 
oil is outdone immeasurably in our days, for they 
go there poor one year, and go home rich ; in four 
years they become money-lenders, all by a trust in 
that gracious providence that takes care of legisla- 
tors' salaries. Their next duty after that is to serve 
the party that sent them up, and then, if there is 
anything left of them, it belongs to the Common- 
wealth. Some one has said, very wisely, that if a 
man travelling wishes to relish his dinner he had 
better not go into the kitchen to see where it is being 
cooked ; if any man wishes to respect and obey the 
law, he had better not go to the Legislature to see 
where it is cooked. This, I presume, is entirely an. 
American point of view. 

The Best Government. 

Well, there are a great many more faults in self- 
government, but time will not permit me to 
enumerate them all, and yet I say that self-govern- 
ment is the best government that ever existed on 
the face of the earth. How should that be with all 
these damaging facts? " By their fruits ye shall 
know them." What a government is, is to be 
determined by the kind of people it raises, and I 
will defy the whole world in time past, and in time 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 19 

present, to show so vast a proportion of citizens so 
well off, so contented, so remunerated by their toil. 
The average of happiness under our self-govern- 
ment is greater than it ever has been, or can be, 
found under any sky, or in any period of human 
history. And the philosophical reason is not far to 
mid ; it belongs to that category in which a worse 
thing is sometimes a great deal better than a better 
thing. William has been to school for over a year, 
and his teacher says to him one day : " Now, 
"William, I am afraid your father will think that I 
am not doing well by you ; you must write a com- 
position — you must send your father a good compo- 
sition to show what you are doing." Well, William 
never did write a composition, and he does not 
know how. "Oh, write about something that you 
do know about — write about your father's farm," 
and so being goaded to his task, William says : 
" A cow is a useful animal. A cow has four legs 
and two horns. A cow gives good milk. I love 
good milk — William Bradshaw." The master looks 
over his shoulder, and says : " Pooh ! your father 
will think you are a cow. Here, give me that com- 
position, I'll fix it." So he takes it home and fixes 
it. Here it reads : " When the sun casts off the 
dusky garments of the night, and appearing o'er the 
orient hills, sips the dew-drops pendant from every 
leaf, the milkmaid goes afield chanting her matin 
song," and so on, and so on. Now I say that, 
rhetorically, the master's composition was unspeak- 
ably better than William's ; but as a part of 
William's education, his poor scrawly lines are un- 
speakably better than the one that has been 
"fixed " for him. No man ever yet learnt by having 
somebody else learn for him. A man learns arith- 
metic by blunder in and blunder out, but at last he 
gets it. A man learns to write through scrawling ; 
a man learns to swim by going into the water, and 



20 THE EEIGN OF 

a man learns to vote by voting. Now we are not 
attempting to make a Government ; we are attempt- 
ing to teach sixty millions of men how to conduct 
a Government by self-control, by knowledge, by 
intelligence, by fair opportunity to practise. It is 
better that we should have sixty millions of men 
learning through their own mistakes how to govern 
themselves, than it is to have an arbitrary Govern- 
ment with the whole of the rest of the people 
ignorant. 

Educational Effect of Democracy. 

Thus far I have spoken of the relation of the 
development of the common people — their relations 
to political economy and to government and politics, 
but I have left out the more important, the less tra- 
versed part. I affirm that the intelligence of the 
great mass of the common people has a direct bear- 
ing upon Science, upon Art, upon morality, upon 
Eeligion itself. It would not seem as though the 
men that were superior in education and knowledge 
could receive anything from those below ; perhaps 
not, perhaps Yes, for that which education gives is 
more nearly artificial than that which is inspired by 
the dominant sense and lower condition of the human 
mind that unites people in greater mass. Why, 200 
years ago, there was but one doctor in the village, 
nobody but him knew anything of medicine. To- 
day hygiene, physiology, are taught in our schools, 
are spread abroad by newspapers or in lectures, or 
from the pulpit, and the common people at any rate 
in our land have their dividends of human knowledge. 
A woman that has brought up six children knows 
more about medicine than the village doctor 200 years 
ago did. 200 years ago, nobody knew anything about 
law but the judge and the councillors- To-day every- 
body knows something about law. We have broken 
open the arcana, we have distributed its treasures of 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 21 

knowledge and the labourer knows something about 
law the farmer, the mechanic, the merchant — every- 
body has an elementary knowledge of law. Has it 
destroyed the profession of the law ? There never 
were so many highly educated men as now in the pro- 
fession of the law, never were they more trustworthy 
and honorable, never had larger interests put into 
their hands, never had larger fees, and never were 
more willing to have them than they are now. They 
do not suffer by the intelligence of the common people 
which comes from distribution of the elementary 
forms of professional knowledge. 

Effect on the Church. 

"Well, how is it with regard to the Church? Just 
the same ; just the same. Three hundred years ago 
there was but one Bible in a parish in England, 
and that was chained to a column in the church ; and 
there was but one man to read it — the priest. And 
the people did not understand it then, and it was a 
part of official duty to go from house to house on the 
theory that the average parent did not know enough 
to teach the children the first principles of morality 
and of religion. Go to-day over the same community 
and on the Sabbath morning you shall see the girls 
and the young men with Bibles under their arms, 
themselves teachers, going down to mission schools, 
going down to instruct their inferiors. The profession 
has distributed its functions among the common 
people. Has it destroyed the profession ? It never 
was stronger, never was as strong as it is to-day. 
Thank God as to mere professional nomination, say 
by ordination, say by some endowment from without, 
there never w T as a time when they had so little 
influence since the Advent as they have to-day : and 
it is growing less and less, and with the ages they will 
grow so pale that they cannot cast a shadow. There 
never was a time when the man of God, because he 



22 THE EEIGN OP 

was a man moved by the Holy Spirit of God to un- 
fold his own moral consciousness, living among men, 
tied to them by no other ties than the sympathies 
of love, there never was a time when he had so 
much influence as he has to-day. And let me say 
that with regard to the title "ministers of the 
Gospel " everywhere, who have great and proper 
influence, it is not the paraphernalia, but it is the 
man inside of all these things that is the power. An 
ennobled manhood is coming into a position of 
influence in this world that it never had in any 
other period, nor in any other nation. This great 
English stock is the root, as the Germanic from 
which it sprang, of the grandest manhood that ever 
has been, but the stature has yet to be greater, and 
the power and the character are yet to be greater. 
Now, has it changed the economy of the Church ? 
has it destroyed it? The Church was never so 
strong as it is to-day. It is not the pastor's business 
any longer to go from house to house as if they were 
ignorant. Fathers and mothers of children have 
now more knowledge than, 300 years ago, the 
minister himself had, and the families are the 
bulwarks of the Church. It may be said that the 
Church has protected the family, but the Church 
itself has had its life from the family emancipated, 
and made larger and nobler. Well, has it promoted 
morality ? Yes ! Of all the schools on earth where 
intelligence and piety dwell together, the father lip 
and the mother love, have been the instructors of 
the children. There is more in these centres of real 
purity, and staunch honesty, and thorough integrity, 
than in any other institutions that are upon the 
earth. 

Effect on Theology. 

Well, has it made any difference with theology? 
Yes, thank God, a great deal of difference. Theology 



THE COMMON PEOPLE. 23 

in every age is the best account that men can 
give of the relations of the human family to God, 
and the types must be the types that society in those 
periods is best acquainted with ; and when men 
thought that the King was Divinely King, and that 
the channel of instruction to mankind came through 
the King, it was almost inevitable that the God 
should be nothing but a superhuman King, having no 
-consideration for the individual, but only thinking 
about His law and about the universe and about 
the national life, not the individual life ; and that 
theology underlays much of their Evangelicanism, 
and men are running round it or creeping over it, 
or running against it and knocking their brains out. 
Well, what has the education of the common people 
done in that regard ? It has taught men the mean- 
ing of the first sentence of the Lord's prayer : " Our 
Father." The old theology is from the forge, from 
law, from Government among men ; the New 
Testament theology takes its centre in the Father- 
hood of God and in the Divine love. And how has 
that theology been changed? If there be one thing 
which the family can teach men it is the doctrine of 
love, and if there be one priestess that can teach it 
above all others it is the mother. Hers are the 
sufferings that precede the child's existence; through 
the doors and pangs of the mother it comes to life. 
She is the food of the child, she watches it. If it 
is sick she is the nurse ; if it suffers she suffers yet 
more. She gives up all her natural liberty, she 
■accounts no assembly so full of pleasure, and no- 
where else is her life so sweet to her as by the side 
of the cradle or with the babe in her lap. For this 
she suffered, for this she gives all her knowledge, 
and as it grows up step by step she feeds it, and 
she becomes its knowledge and its righteousness, 
and its justice and its sanctification ; she stands for 
it, and out of her it lives. And when the father 



24: THE EEIGN OF THE COMMON PEOPLE. 

even has lost out of his ear the funeral bell when 
the child has gone, the mother hears it toll to the 
end of her life. Or, when misled and over-tempted, 
a child in ascending years breaks away from family 
influence and goes down step by step to disgrace and 
misery, and at last is afar off, the dear child sends 
back word: "Oh, mother, may I come home to 
die? " there is no reproach, the one word that rings. 
out like an angel's trumpet is : " Oh, my child, 
come home," and the mother's knee to the returning 
prodigal is the most sacred place in the universe this 
side of the feet of Jesus Christ, and if there be one 
single creature out of Heaven or on the earth that 
is able to teach the theologian what is the love of 
God, it is the mother. And that work has but 
begun, and both the teacher, the preacher, and the 
Church are to see balmier and better days in the 
time to come, when at last we shall have a theology 
that teaches the Fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man. 

The Cry for Peace. 
Men are alarmed, they want peace. "Well, you 
can find it in the graveyard, and that is the 
only place. Among living men you can find no 
peace. Growth means disturbance ; peace means 
death in any such sense as that of non-investi- 
gation, not changing, and if men say : " If you 
give up the old landmark you do not know where 
you will land." I know where you will land 
if you do not. Do you believe in God? I do. Do 
you believe that He has a providence over human 
affairs ? I do. xlnd I believe that that hand that 
has steered this vagrant world through all the dark 
seas and storms of the past has hold of the helm 
yet, and through all seeming confusions He will steer 
the nations and the people to the golden harbour of 
the millennium safe. Trust Him, love Him, and 
rejoice. 



THE WASTES AND BURDENS 
OF SOCIETY. 



I SPEAK on the wastes and burdens of society. 
Society is the most comprehensive of all in- 
stitutions, the most complex. It is really the 
method under which men live together in all their 
interests, in their social relations, in their business, 
in their very various conditions of poverty, or riches , 
or industry. It is the largest subject that could be 
handled, and so large that when the subtler elements 
are considered that enter into it, no man can com- 
prehend the whole of it. He can select departments, 
the moral elements, the political elements, the in- 
dustrial elements, the intellectual elements ; but 
there is in society something more than either or all 
of these put together. There is that which in the 
human body exists ; there are hands, there are feet, 
there is a heart, and there is a head ; but when the 
physiologist has enumerated every organ and all its 
functions, he has not yet described the man. Life 
is that subtle thing that no man can express and no 
man can understand ; and so it is in that great 
organic body — society. Under the providence of 
God it is an existence having within itself, though 
apparently much mixed and obscured, a life of its 
own. Its formation depends very much on climate, 
on the occupations of men, on the government and 



26 THE WASTES AND 

laws under which they live, upon the condition of 
religious beliefs that prevail among them, whether 
old or late information ; yet, after all, with all these 
variations effected by these incidental circumstances, 
there is something more than these enumerations 
indicate. If you had never seen an acorn or any 
seed brought from a distant land, you might make a 
difference in its growth by the soil which you gave 
it, by the culture that followed it, by the climate in 
which it was brought forward ; but after all there 
would be in that seed something that would not 
change ; it would go right on from the germ to un- 
fold itself as it pleased, according to the nature that 
was in the seed. This is entirely set aside, appa- 
rently, by those men who are seeking to reconstruct 
society in the air upon the principle of a theory. 
They think that society as it has been is very im- 
perfect ; so do I. They think it maybe made much 
better ; so do I. They think they have got the trick 
of doing it ; and I don't. They formulate this, and 
they formulate that, and after all society goes 
stumbling on and has its own way. As if a naturalist 
would think that an elephant was a great deal too 
big, and that he was clumsy, and should undertake 
to make elephants grow up to his own idea of 
alertness and strength combined, as they are not 
in the elephant. Society is an unmanageable thing. 
Whatever exertion you lay out on it will pro- 
duce some effect; but it will not be the resultant 
of your will, but the result that Nature gives 
to this complex organisation as it pleases her. 
Let rne then proceed, not to undertake to pro- 
pound a new theory of what society ought to be, 
hut simply to do what every doctor does. He can 
diagnose what is the health or sickness of every in- 
dividual, but he cannot reconstruct it ; he has got to 
act upon the lines of creation for each individual. 
I can criticise, I can point out wastes, I can show 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 27 

the burdens, and these may successively be cut down 
by criticism, and practically reduced in weight, in 
number, in various ways ; but this is very different 
from undertaking to reconstruct society from that 
foundation upon some notion of philosophy. 



The Waste of Sickness. 

The first burden that I shall mention, the first 
waste, is sickness and weakness. Here and all 
the way through I beg you to understand that 
I am not discussing these topics, which in 
succession will come up, from the standpoint of 
humanity or morality, and still less from the stand- 
point of spiritual religion, but from the standpoint 
of political economy. That is the " science " which 
takes cognisance of the production of wealth, its 
distribution, and its uses in rendering society strong 
and happy, and I am speaking now in regard to each 
successive phase of waste and of burden from that 
point. 

A Loss of Two-Thirds. 

The proper duration of human life I suppose to be 
anywhere from eighty to a hundred years. Men are 
built so that they have a right to expect that. A 
man ought to be ashamed to die before he is seventy 
years old. But the average duration of human life 
is about thirty-three years. Consider what a waste 
that is, when society has in itself the power of pro- 
longing life to a hundred years, or ninety years, or 
eighty years, and the average of the duration of life 
is but thirty, according to the old account, and 
thirty-three now, according to the more modern esti- 
mate. Well, here is two-thirds wasted ; one-third 
only does all the work that is done in human society ; 
and if you consider the period of non-productive- 



28 THE WASTES AND 

ness necessary in the development of childhood, 
and if you give to the aged and outworn the liberty 
of some years on the other side of life, and then 
count the productive forces, I think it may be said, 
taking the world over, it is an insufficient estimate 
that one-fourth of the human family do all the work 
that is done, and support the other three-fourths. 
Now, sickness is, from the standpoint of political 
economy, a squandering of the forces of productive 
labour in human life. No corporation, no commer- 
cial enterprise could succeed, — they would go to 
smash, the whole of them, — if they wasted three- 
fourths of all their forces ; and yet this great institu- 
tion, human society, squanders three-fourfchs of all 
its forces, and yet steadily holds on its way through 
time ; in spite of all its diseases and all its burdens 
and all its squanderings, it continues to exist ; such 
are its vital forces. 

Waste of Weakness. 

Now, from the standpoint of political economy, 
weakness is worse than sickness, for if a man has 
any self-respect when he is sick he will either get 
well or he will die, but a man that is weak will not 
do either. He not only does nothing, but he hangs 
on the hands of men who do take care of him, and 
so far as political economy is concerned, though 
adding nothing he subtracts a good deal. From the 
standpoint of affection it is a very different question, 
but from the standpoint of the productiveness of 
mankind in political economy it is a very fair ques- 
tion, so that weakness and death are to be regarded 
as the wastes of the industrial forces of human 
life. 

A Vaporous Intimacy. 

One would not suppose, after the world has had 
philosophy so long and has so much of it now, that 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 29 

there would be any need, such as I feel burdened 
"with to-night, to set forth how utterly inadequate 
men's ideas are in regard to the maintenance and 
propagation of health. There are two things that 
God made the most of in this world that men are 
more afraid of than of anything else — fresh air 
and cold water. As regards this matter of fresh 
air : so that a man can breathe, he seldom troubles 
himself what it is he is breathing ; but nature con- 
siders what it is that he is breathing all the time. 
I have been speaking for more than fifty years 
in every conceivable place — in halls, in churches 
— and I have yet to meet one single place 
where an audience ought to be detained for an 
hour. A healthy man in the open air breathes 
about 2,000 cubic feet of air an hour. Our best 
hospitals make arrangements for about 1,200 feet 
per hour; our best gaols and penitentiaries make 
provision for about 600 cubic feet per hour ; what 
the churches provide I do not know. The schools 
in the city of Philadelphia — and it is supposed to be 
a model city — provide for each child 156 cubic feet 
per hour. In our schools in Brooklyn, where I live, 59, 
45, 39, and, in one disgraceful instance, 24 cubic feet 
are provided for those little wretches that we call 
our children. If they had been thieves they would 
have got 600 in gaol. An audience gathered together 
in ordinary assembly-rooms not only has no con- 
siderable proportion of that which they should have, 
but ordinarily in such an assembly-room as this, in 
about fifteen minutes the fresh air has been all used 
up once, and as there is very little resupply it will very 
soon be breathed over twice, three times, four times, 
five times, and in less than an hour every man, 
woman, and child in this assembly will have in him 
something of every other man, woman, and child. 
It is but very rarely that one sees a person who 
thinks so well of him that he would like to eat him 



30 TEE WASTES AND 

up. This vaporous intimacy with each other's in- 
teriors is not wholesome, and yet it is almost 
universal. The filth of it never seems to have 
struck anybody at all. If you were to invite a 
friend to your house, and put him^into a bed where 
fifty men in succession had slept without any change 
of sheets, he would justly think you were a filthy 
householder, and you would have a right to be 
ashamed ; or if you sat a man down to your table, 
and told him that ten men had eaten from that 
knife and fork and plate before he came in, he would 
not tolerate it for a moment ; but yet they will go 
on eating each other over and over and over again 
without the slightest reluctance. Every man or 
woman in a congregation has something in him in 
half-an-hour of everybody else. But nobody thinks 
about it, and of all creation the men who think less 
about it than any others are architects. They make 
clean the outside and beautify the house, but within 
it is full of dead men's breaths, or the dead breaths 
of men. 



A Man's Value. 

Well, there has been an estimate formed in the 
United States, which I suppose will answer sub- 
stantially for Great Britain, as to the economical 
value of a man. We estimate a man's value in the 
United States as based upon the fact that men earn 
upon an average 600 dollars a year, and a man's value 
is a capital whose interest amounts to 600 dollars 
a year, and every time an experienced mechanic, 
every time a labouring farmer, every time a pro- 
ductive citizen dies, the community loses the 
capital, whose annual interest is 600 dollars. Of 
course, when I am called to a funeral I never take 
it on that standpoint. I never say, " Six hundred 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 31 

dollars gone, brethren." Sentiment, taste, and re- 
ligious feeling would prevent that, but it is gone, 
and gone very largely by the decease of men whom 
society cannot afford to let go. If an annual death 
of 600 men in the community had taken place, and 
they were all mere politicians, why we could get 
along all the better for their going. But one in- 
genious, inventive, skilful, and industrious mechanic 
is worth a whole shoal of those insects that fly about 
the community called politicians. 



A Civic Duty. 

Now, it is the duty of every civic ruler to look at 
this matter ; it is the duty of every governing body, 
national State, county, town, city, to look after the 
health of the citizens, in draining, in lighting, in 
cleansing the streets, and in securing them from 
epidemics, or from the more gradual causes of 
sickness, and weakness, and death. And in doing 
this work it is indispensable, according to the 
dictates of the largest philosophy, and that is 
Christianity, that the care should be at the bottom 
of society, first and mainly, and not at the top. If 
you go into a community and see beautiful man- 
sions, you have a right to rejoice in them. I like 
to see fine streets, well shaded ; I like to see com- 
fortable dwellings, surrounded by flowers, and all 
the elements of taste ; but, after all, I can form no 
idea of the Christian civilisation of any community 
till I go down and see where the working-men live, 
where the mechanics live. The test of civilisation 
is not at the top, it is the average, but more espe- 
cially the bottom of society. They may be too 
weak to do it themselves, they may be too ignorant 
to do it themselves ; it is, therefore, one of the 
highest duties of civic bodies to see to it, that the 



32 THE WASTES AND 

great under-mass of human society are put and kept 
in conditions of health. 



Look to the Cellar! 

And there is also an appeal in this matter to those 
that are able by reason of knowledge and of wealth 
to have ventilated dwellings and all the sanitary 
appliances of modern knowledge. It is right ; but 
it is not the only thing that is right. No man can 
go home and shut his door and walk upon his royal 
■carpets and say, "All things in my house conduce to 
health." Society is so knit together that the con- 
dition of the upper classes is very largely, though 
indirectly, determined by the condition of the under 
•classes, and in no one respect more than in the 
matter of health ; for, although they may seem to 
you brutal, there is no family so poor, there is no 
family so ignorant, there is no family so sottish that 
they cannot develop smallpox and malarial fevers. 
They know enough for that if they do not know 
other things, and when they are developed they do 
not stay at home ; the wind carries them, they 
sweep through the whole community, and the 
neglect and indolence of the upper classes may 
xeturn in the form of so-called Divine Providence 
through the development of epidemics by the under 
classes of society. For their own sake and for the 
sake of humanity every thinking man and citizen 
well off should see to it that the great body of 
society should be taken care of and that a pre- 
ventable disease should not be allowed to ravage the 
•community. It is pretty generally the custom in 
New England, where the winters are long, to have 
a great store of potatoes, cabbages, onions, and all 
manner of vegetables, and the old-fashioned way 
was as soon as the climate became too severe for 
them to be left out in the open air, to put them in 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 33 

the cellars, which are built with thick walls and 
where they will not freeze, and when the spring 
begins to come on and the remnant of the vegetables 
begins to reek and germinate malarial influences, 
'those silent, vaporous influences steal up through 
crack and cranny and partition. By-and-by one of 
the children is sick ; the doctor is sent for. He says : 
*' It is singular that the child should have such a 
"trouble as this ; if you lived in a squalid neighbour- 
hood I could understand it, but this looks very much 
as if it were malarial disease." The child dies. By- 
and-by a second child is taken sick, and the wonder 
grows ; and the mother goes down, and by this time 
they send for the minister, and he looks grave. 
" Mysterious providence ! " he says. Mysterious 
providence ! It is not providence at all ; it is rotten 
•onions and potatoes downstairs. You cannot have 
a foul cellar and not have a dangerous upstairs ; and 
in society the upper classes have a great deal more 
risk than they are apt to suppose ; though they keep 
themselves in a sanitive condition, yet there is this 
reeking influence that is coming up directly or in- 
directly from society everywhere. 

The Paeasite Waste. 

The next burden and waste in society that I 
should mention is that which springs upon us from 
our parasites . A parasite is an animal organised to 
get its living out of somebody else. It does not 
work ; it sucks for a living. Of course, you know 
what a vegetable parasite is, the red spider, and the 
green aphis and aphides everywhere ; we know 
what animal parasites are, intestinal or exterior; 
but the worst parasites in the world are human 
parasites, and society is full of them. All healthy 
men competent to work, but unwilling, who live 
upon society without giving an equivalent, I call 



34'- THE WASTES AND 

parasites. The young man has had some ambition • 
he has run through his active energies, and he 
loiters about the streets morning and noon and 
night, and picks up a living, Providence may know- 
how. At last he comes to that condition in which, 
having chanced one day in church to hear from the 
noble old book, " Go to the ant, thou sluggard ; 
consider her ways, and be wise," off he goes to his 
aunt, and lives on her after that. All vicious men, 
and men that come to the legitimate results of vice, 
all criminal men that forsake industries and live by 
warfare, open or secret, I call parasites. These that 
become the offscouring of communities, that ichor- 
ously drop from stage to stage, and at the bottom 
form a malarious mud — these parasites of society 
are wasters ; and I have a right to denounce vice 
and crime and all the courses that lead to them, 
not alone upon high moral principle, not alone upon, 
mere schedules of morality, but because they are 
my enemies and your enemies, and they bleed us 
and suck us, they are vermin that infest our bodies 
and our families. And if these classes are vicious, 
criminal, and parasitic, how much more are they 
that make them, those whose very trade and liveli- 
hood consist in making vicious and criminal parasites 
in a community ? The men that make drunkards 
are worse than the drunkards. The men that make 
gamblers are worse than the gamblers. The men 
that furnish lust with its material are worse than 
those that are overcome by the lust. 

A Citizen's Bight 

And yet, when we preach a doctrine of re- 
striction and ask for laws that should hold in 
these parasites of society, what a clamour is 
raised — we are interfering with the liberty of 
men ; they have a right to support their families. 
Especially they say, " What has a minister got 



BUBDENS OF SOCIETY. 35 

to do with this business ? Why does not he 
attend to preaching the gospel of peace ? Why- 
does he come out and interfere with the avocations 
of men in society ? " I was a citizen before I was 
a minister, and I do it as a man and citizen, not 
as a professional minister ; yet I would do it that 
way rather than let it go undone, for I am one 
of those who do not believe in that kind of min- 
ister that seems to be a cross between a man and a 
woman. There was a time when a man with a 
hectic cheek and sunken eye was supposed to be 
near heaven, and fitted to teach men and young 
men in the proportion in which he was going to 
the grave himself. Times are changed, and now 
men are robust and strong, open-eyed men, and 
they are ministers because they are men and have 
practical, humane thoughts and sympathies, living 
among men as men, and not lifted above men on 
some velvet shelf where by reason of their mere 
externals they are considered above and better than 
the average of human nature. Either way, I think 
it is the duty of every moral teacher to scourge the 
makers of vices and the makers of crimes, and the 
men that invalidate the health or morality of the 
great body of the community. And there is 
another reason why I have a right to speak out. 
You declare that I have no right to meddle with 
other people's business ; no, but I have a right to 
take care of my own business. My sons and 
daughters are dear to me, and when men do wrong 
about them by lures and temptations and snares, 
for humanity's sake as well as for parental affection 
and love I have a right to interfere. 

A Woman's Vote. 

And I hold that that is a sphere in which above all 
others a woman has a right to interfere. What are 
called woman's rights are simply the rights of human 



36 THE WASTES AND 

beings, and before a woman can do right and well' 
in the direction of humanity and virtue she has a, 
right to vote. In our land the vote is rapidly becom- 
ing the magister as things go with us, and more 
and more throughout all civilised countries the- 
power of the vote is increasing. I hold that a woman 
has the right to vote ; but if you withhold from her 
on any considerations of supposed propriety voting 
for the remote questions of civility, there is one 
sphere where a woman is not allowed to vote, and 
where she ought to have a vote. She brings forth 
children in pain, she spends and squanders her life 
on them, bringing them up from infancy and help- 
lessness to manhood and strength ; and if there is. 
one creature on the earth that has a right to vote what 
sort of school there should be in a district, what 
teacher should be there, for how many months it 
should be kept open, what should be taught in it, if 
there is one person who has a right to speak of the 
gambling dens and drinking hells that are round 
about her family, it is the mother of the children, 
and in all police relations and educational matters 
and everything that touches the virtue and morality 
of society, our civilisation will not be perfected until 
it should be, as it is in religion, that man and woman 
stand before God equal and alike. 

An Arrogant Tax-gatherer. 

There is another aspect of this matter of the- 
criminal classes that is worthy a moment's considera- 
tion. It is industry that pays for laziness; it is 
virtue that pays for vice ; it is law-abiding and God- 
fearing men that pay for unprincipled men's mis- 
deeds. All the waste of society is made up by the 
virtuous elements in it. I am taxed, you are taxed 
heavily — taxed not for humanity in the care of the 
disabled poor — that tax we pay cheerfully — but you 
are taxed and I am taxed for the ignorance, for the 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 37 

vice, for the crime, for the laziness, of all the para- 
sitic forces of human society. I am content when I 
am taxed by our law that applies equally to every one, 
but the pickpocket has no right to put his hand in 
my pocket ; and the grog-seller has no right to levy 
taxes on me. The vices of society are the most 
arrogant of tax-gatherers ; they lay the imposts 
themselves ; they themselves declare how much 
men shall pay ; they collect it themselves ; you stand 
by and pay for the devil's wages. 

The Waste of Ignorance. 

The third waste that I shall mention is that which 
comes from ignorance. It is a great loss to a man 
to have had a head put on him with nothing in it, 
and next to that it is a great misfortune to a man to 
have had a good deal put into his head and not 
know it is there. It is a curse to an ignorant man 
to be ignorant. If a man had no eyes, no ears, and 
no use of his tongue, he would be shut out from so 
much of knowledge, and every man would bemoan 
his condition and ask, " Why does he live ? " But 
more than the eyes and the ears and the tongue are 
perpetually paralysed in an ignorant man. Eyes he 
has, but he cannot see the length of his hand ; ears 
he has, and all the finest sounds in creation escape 
him ; a tongue he has, but it is cursed with blunder- 
ing. An ignorant man is a man whom God packed 
up and men have not yet unfolded. If a man has as 
a mechanic a chest of tools and knows how to use a 
gimlet and a saw, and that is all, it is a great de- 
privation to him ; he cannot keep up in the race of 
life ; and an ignorant man must of necessity be 
dropping down, down to the bottom. 

The Average Tells. 

Society moves upon averages. It is not enough 
to make society progressive, to develop the top of' 



38 THE WASTES AND 

it. In the dairy it may be all very well to have the 
cream on the top, but it is very poor in society to 
have the thing repeated ; for society does not move 
by the force of its top — that influences some — but it 
is the average of the mass that either accelerates or 
retards the movements of society in advance. It is 
the hull and the freight, and not the sails alone, 
that determine the quickness of the voyage, and 
ignorance at the bottom of society benumbs society ; 
it is obliged to drag this vast bulk. It is like a 
gouty man trying to walk ; he may be good at the 
top and all the way down, but his feet are not good, 
and he cannot walk. It behoves, therefore, as a 
matter of political economy simply, that by schools 
and popular knowledge ignorance should be purged 
out from every community. There can be no pros- 
perity that is deserving of that name that leaves at 
the bottom a section of ignorance nearly equal to 
that in the middle or top of society. 

Political Ignorance. 

But chiefly it is the relation of ignorance to 
public affairs that I would emphasize — the rela- 
tion of ignorance in the production of property, 
and the relation of ignorance in that which 
concerns all property, legitimate legislation, and 
administration. In olden times, when there were 
but two classes in the State, one of whom said : 
tl Thus saith the king," and the other had nothing 
to do but to say : " Yea" and " Amen," it did not 
matter so very much in the matter of political 
economy. But with the growth of the ages the 
light that in early times shone only on the top of 
the mountain is finding its way down the mountain 
side lower and lower into the valley, and the inevit- 
able course of the development of humanity is that 
the great under classes shall have some voice, and 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 39 

at last we have come to a period in which it may be 
said of all the civilised nations of Europe and of 
America that the mass of the common people have 
come to such a twilight intelligence as that they 
are partners in the administration of law and of 
government. Now, where men holding the vote 
are really determinative of the best legislation, it is 
to the last degree important that they should have 
both knowledge and intelligence. I make a distinc- 
tion between knowledge and intelligence ; intelli- 
gence is the capacity to see, to understand, to choose, 
to determine ; it is an ever-active force ; but know- 
ledge is merely the fruit of intelligence — what it has 
found out. They are separable. I have known a 
great many men stop with knowledge — that could do 
nothing ; I have kifown men that had intelligence 
and no education, and did a great deal. Best it is 
that both, large knowledge springing from active 
intelligence, should be the possession of every 
citizen. 

Free Schools. 

Above all, we need that men should have that 
kind of education that should enable them to put 
themselves to their best uses. And this, if I may 
be permitted to say so, in ignorance particularly of 
your systems of education, for I do not profess to 
know them, is an experiment that has been carried 
on in our land — my own land — in America. We 
hold there that it is a crime to allow a man to grow 
or his children to grow up in ignorance, and it is 
a crime against the Commonwealth. From the 
Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and from the Lakes 
on the North to the Gulf of Mexico on the South, 
there is not now a State nor a territory, the popula- 
tion being either white or black, foreign emigrants 
or native-born citizens, in which there is not est a 



40 THE WASTES AND 

Wished a free public school for the country. For it 
is held to be necessary for the existence of the 
Commonwealth that those that have the power of 
the vote shall have that power in the hands of 
intelligence, and for the conservation of the State 
itself. The State, the Commonwealth thereof, all 
of them determine that the people, as the first con- 
dition of citizenship, shall come up through the 
common schools of America, and no man pays one 
farthing for the instruction of his children, because 
the State cannot afford any other conditions for its 
rising population. More than that, the common 
schools of America are more and more going upon 
such a ground as that wealth and position cannot 
afford to go anywhere else for the education of its 
children. We are making our common schools so 
good that no paid school can stand under the grip ot 
them. And it is a good thing in another way, too ; 
it is a good thing for every class in society, however 
widely they may ultimately differ, to start together 
in a common citizenship. The children of the rich 
and the children of the poor sit together on the same 
bench. The rich man's dunce has no preference 
over the poor man's genius. Here is a clergyman's 
son, and right alongside of him the son of the clergy- 
man's washerwoman, and oftentimes the last shall be 
first and the first last. Where there is to be a govern- 
ment of the people it is a good thing that for once 
in their life there shall be a level, and that the chil- 
dren shall stand on that democratic level all together 
and alike ; then let them shoot up just as far as their 
several talents will allow them. 



The Waste of Quaeeelsomeness. 

The next and fourth of the wastes that I shaft 
mention is that of quarrelsomeness, the bulldog 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 41 

nature of men. Darwin supposes that men de- 
scended, or ascended, rather, from the animal, and 
I think I have seen men that came down through 
the wolf — another man seems to have come down 
through the bear, another through the fox, and 
some men through the hog, and I see some men 
that came down through the bulldog. The excite- 
ment of life with them is some form of combating ; 
they love to fight. Now, the honest and temperate 
conflict, the attrition of mind with mind, the com- 
parison of opinions and the proof of them in a 
gentle school of fencing is beneficial. The want of 
excitement is death. Excitement carried on from 
the basilar passions is bad ; but intellectual and 
moral excitement are the very conditions of social 
life. But that kind of excitement that becomes 
quarrelsome and cruel has stood in the way of 
human progress for centuries, and it is not out of 
the way yet. For example, there are organised 
hindrances that stand upon quarrelsomeness and 
selfishness. In commerce competition, to a certain 
extent, is honest, but carried to excess it becomes 
quarrelsomeness. They may, and often do, try to 
swallow up all those that are weaker than they. 
Up to a certain point it is normal, but beyond that 
point I think it is criminal. All attempts ta 
restrict the liberty of men, and all violence in doing 
it, are criminal. I do not speak alone of govern- 
mental violence, but of legislative violence. I am 
sure I carry you with me when I say that I regard 
Free Trade as being the virtue of our age, and that 
oppressive taxations are quarrelling with the best 
interests of the whole of human society. 

Beligious Quarrelsomeness. 

But all these things are not to be compared for 
one moment. The conflicts of politics, the fierce 



42 THE WASTES AND 

engendered strifes that grow out of it, the over- 
reaching, the under-reachings of men — all these 
secular things are not to be compared for one single 
moment as hindrances with organised religious 
quarrelsomeness. About eighteen hundred years 
ago some inexpert angels came singing out of 
heaven, and their song or chaunt was : " On earth 
peace and goodwill to men! " and they looked down 
-and saw what men were doing, and they flew back 
to heaven as quick as they could go, and never sang 
that song again. There never was so little of any- 
thing on earth as peace, and among those things 
that have destroyed it nothing has done more than 
organised religion. Religion as a creed or system 
has been one of the most ruthless or destructive of 
the influences that have ravaged human society. 
Turn back on the pages of history. Look at the 
wars that have sprung from creed differences ; look 
at the battles, the despotism, the racks, the inqui- 
sitions ; go through the bloody path in which the 
feet of the Prince of Peace, acting as Providential 
Governor of the world, has passed. Christ has 
trodden again Gethsemane, and that for two thou- 
sand years, and the chief advocates of His opposi- 
tion have been those that were anointed and 
ordained to preach the principle of love and of 
peace. All the world, when the Greek Church and 
the great Catholic Church were at odds with each 
other, was inflamed. In both Churches — but more 
especially in the Catholic Church — what noble 
names ! what saintly women ! what admirable 
men ! what a sweet literature ! And to-day, how 
it shows some of the noblest specimens of Christian 
life ! And yet, when you look upon its whole pro- 
longed history, you see it smiting here and there by 
the sword, by fines, imprisonments, and in every 
other way. Eeligion was spoiled in its very foun- 
tain, and instead of its being love, the fulfilling of 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 43 

the law of the universe, it was simply infernal ; and 
in those ages in which the Church organised itself 
to compel everybody to worship in some one way, 
to believe in some one schedule of doctrine, to 
declare themselves in affiliation with any special 
line of organisations, I do not wonder that a man 
who was a Christian after the New Testament idea 
was an infidel. Thousands of men have turned 
away from religion organised because they were 
just and humane, because they loved God and they 
loved their fellow-men. There are no more dun- 
geons now in civilised lands where men are im- 
prisoned for the want of orthodoxy. No more are 
men burned, no more are men exiled, no more are 
men fined and their property confiscated. The 
punishment has changed; but it has not been 
destroyed. A more exquisite torture is where you 
take a man's name awa}? - from him, and his reputa- 
tion, and make one sect stand over against another 
with sneer and hissing, where you make a man 
because he is of a different Church from yourself a 
by-word, and warn men against him. The differ- 
ence between you and him may be on a point of 
abstract philosophy, or it may turn on ornaments, 
or on some mediaeval doctrine ; it is no excuse to 
say that a man that torments and punishes with 
moral intolerance believes it is necessary ; it makes 
no difference what he believes. The man without 
the spirit of Christ may believe what he pleases, but 
he is anti-Christ. 



Growing Fellowship. 

The condition of sects is very much improving. I 
have no objection to sects, denominations — have 
just as many as you mind to have, if you only teach 
them to behave themselves. A sect is under the 



44 THE WASTES AND 

same Christian law as an individual is. I have no 
Tight to go and see what time my neighbour has 
breakfast, though it differs from my time. I have 
no right to inspect his table and see what he eats 
and drinks ; whole streets may live in amity and 
fellowship though they differ in a housekeeping 
way ; they have perfect fellowship in secular things, 
hut jealousies appear in all the elements that lie 
higher than that — in the realm of purity and love. 
The day is advancing rapidly, for so large is 
becoming the sphere of mutual co-operative work in 
the reforms that are going on, that men who before 
would scarcely look at each other or walk on the 
same side of the street find themselves assembled 
on peace or temperance platforms, and, to their 
amazement, when they see a brother there, and 
look him over, he has neither horns nor hoofs. It 
is a great thing to bring men together. The effect 
of organised orthodoxy in days gone by has been to 
keep men apart. That was the theory of the Old 
Testament. To save men from idolatry and the 
infectious passions that belonged to it, they were 
shut up in Palestine; but when Christ came, 
regarding the moral forces of religion as sufficiently 
strong to take care of themselves, He said to His 
disciples: "Go ye into all the world, and preach 
the Gospel to every creature." And the spirit of 
Christianity is one that spreads itself, accepts the 
universality of humanity, and tends to draw men to 
each other in creed and in church and in life. A 
procedure in this life that disintegrates and scatters 
moral and honest men is not Christian. By-and-by, 
when all the good that is in all the churches shall 
he confluent, and when men shall help each other 
hy all that they agree in ; when the things in which 
men agree — which are a hundred times more than 
those in which they disagree — shall come to the 
front and to the top, there is moral power enough in 



/ 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 45 

this world to make an advance of ages as measured 
by the past. 

The Waste of Misfits. 

The fifth topic of waste and burden is the misfit 
of men. One thing is very certain, that no man can 
do his best work except along the line of his strongest 
faculties. Sometimes men do not know what the 
line of their strongest faculties is, and very often 
nobody else knows. And yet, when you look at 
society and the adaptations of men, this misfit of 
men to function is very pitiful. The best strength 
of men is wasted often. There are men most 
conscientious, most serenely sweet and pure and 
pious, digging and delving away in the pulpit where 
they are not fitted to be. A man that is fitted for 
the pulpit is a man that has the genius of moral 
ideas, and there are a great many men that have not 
the genius of moral ideas, or any other, and yet they 
are in the pulpit. I can say this with the more 
boldness here, as I have so many ministers present. 

The Mystery of the World. 

But did it ever occur to you that of all the 
mysteries in this world the greatest are not religious 
mysteries, not the Trinity, not Atonement, not 
decrees, not election, not any of these things ? The 
mystery of this world is how men were created and 
shoved on to this globe, and let alone. Whatever has 
been revealed in Old or New Testament that tells of 
man, is that he has got a brain, and that is a seat of 
intelligence, but it has been only within my memory 
that men have been taught that brains were of any 
use. Hundreds of men do not believe it yet. Ages 
went away before a man knew what the heart was 
for, or what it was doing. Men were not told in the 
early day, neither by writing on the heavens nor by 
words spoken by the prophet, nor was it made known 



46 THE WASTES AND 

by any philosophy, what the structure of their own 
bodies was, and the relation of their bodily condi- 
tion to the outward world, which itself also was a 
wilderness of ideas. They had no idea of what was 
its organisation ; they were left as perfectly helpless 
as a child in the nursery, and it was through hundreds 
and thousands of years that men groped and groped 
and died, when the medicine was right under their 
feet in the vegetable world ; although there was the 
remedy no voice told them of it. What if I put a 
child on the foot-board of a locomotive and say : 
" Kun this Flying Dutchman 500 miles, and it will 
be death if you come to any accident." The human 
body is a more complicated piece of machinery than 
any engine ; yet for ages and ages until our day men 
have had no considerable insight either into their 
own structure, or into the relations of the physical 
world, or into the highest problems that belong to 
morality or religion. 

Greyhounds for Oxen. 

And, even now, when a young man of fifteen 
or sixteen wants to know what he is fit for, 
who can tell him? He goes to the doctor, who 
sounds his heart and lungs, and says : " You 
are healthy." " Well, what should a healthy young 
man do ? " " Oh, you had better go to the school- 
master." The schoolmaster says : " Are you 
advanced in mathematics ? Do you know something 
about history and political economy?" "Yes; 
what would you recommend me to do for my liveli- 
hood? " " Well, anything that happens to come to 
hand." He can give him no direction. He goes to 
the minister, and his minister says to him : " Have 
you been baptized ? Do you say your prayers every 
morning and night ? Do you believe in the creed ? " 
" W T ell, sir, what do you recommend me to do as my 
life business ? " " Well, I commend you to Provi- 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 47 

dence ? " The minister is as ignorant as the man is 
— the blind leading the blind. In this condition of 
things, is it strange that men should take to their 
professions not from an elective affinity, not because 
they feel an impulse to run along the lines of their 
strongest faculties, but from ambition, and from the 
promise of gain, and from misguiding love ? Here 
is a man, a bricklayer, and he has organised industry 
and acquired great wealth, and his family increases 
amain. His eldest son they set up in business, and 
he has inherited from his father business tact. The 
second son grows up, and the mother says : " Well 
now, James is a very conscientious boy, and I think 
we had better make a lawyer of him." They do, and 
he utterly fails. They say: "William? — William 
seems to have parts and has an interest in Nature ; I 
think we had better make him a doctor. That is a 
very respectable calling — we will make a doctor of 
William. As to Thomas, he is a good boy ; he is not 
very strong in body, and he is not so bright in mind 
as the other children, but he would make a good 
minister ; " and so the parental idea is not, " What 
are my children fitted for ? " but, " What is respect- 
able ? What will give them standing in the opinion 
of their fellow-men." And somen are perpetually 
going to things that are above their capacity and 
other men in various conditions of life are toiling in 
spheres that are below their capacity. What if a 
farmer should harness greyhounds together and 
plough with them? What if racing on the track 
was to be made by oxen? An ox is for strength,. 
a greyhound for speed; but men are greyhounds 
where they ought to be oxen, and oxen where 
they ought to be greyhounds, all their lives. 
How should they know ? By their blunders, 
mostly. How often most admirable men of ideas 
are mere copyists ! They generate thought, they 
have latent poetry in them, they have latent inspira- 

p 



48 THE WASTES AND 

tions ; if they had been put in the right avenues, 
and under the right inspirations, these men would 
have been great thinkers, and their life like the out- 
pouring of music. And there are men on the judges' 
bench holding the court who would have made 
good and excellent farmers, and not a few men in 
the blacksmith forge and in the stithy, or in the 
mines, who would have been excellent citizens ; but 
they are all mixed up like a keg of nails. There 
is many a labouring man that would have made a 
good exhorter and a good preacher, and there are 
many preachers that evidently were not " called." 
When God calls a man to preach He always calls 
an audience to go and hear him. There is many a 
man thinks he has heard a call, and doubtless he 
did, but it was somebody else's calL I think I do 
not err when I say that one half of the energy of life 
is badly applied, and that, too, which is adapted for 
the superior functions of human life. There has 
got to be a great light arise in that direction. 

The Waste of Lying. 

Then the next great mischief, which you will 
hear gratefully, because we always like to hear the 
faults discussed which we do not find in ourselves, 
is lying. Craft is the remainder of the animal life 
that inheres in man, for weakness in the presence 
of strength is obliged to resort to craft, to dig under, 
to go sideways. Concealment belongs to weakness 
in the presence of despotic strength. Slavery 
always produces lying subjects, and in the struggle 
for life among men the weak seek to make up their 
deficiencies of strength by craft. And it is not 
always the weak either that do it, for men have an 
impression that truth, pure and unadulterated, is 
like twenty-two carat gold, too soft to wear ordi- 
narily, and that it must be adulterated to about 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 49 

eighteen carat, and then it is tough enough to go. 
They say a judicious mixture between a truth and 
a lie is the true currency, and they do not believe 
in truth. On no subject in this world is there a 
greater lack of faith than truth. You may have 
faith in the Transfiguration, and faith in immor- 
tality, but you have not faith in the safety of telling 
the truth everywhere and always. I am one of 
those that believe the truth ought to be told when- 
ever you tell anything. It is not necessary that a 
man should always tell everything, but whatever he 
tells, it is necessary that that should always be 
truth. A man has a right to concealment. The 
soul has no more business to go stark naked down 
the street than a man has to go stark naked as 
regards his body. It is the preservation of social 
life and of individual life, and the man that has not 
a great silence in him, a great reserve in him, is not 
half a man — he is a babbler, he leaks at the mouth. 
All this talk about benevolent lies, white lies, and the 
customary lies of society — I abhor the whole raff of 
it. But men say, " "Would you advise a physician to 
tell a man that he is going straight down to death ? " 
He will have to die, and lying will not prevent it. 
*" But suppose a man were to come to your house 
for protection, and you conceal him there, and the 
soldiers are right after him in times of civil war, and 
they asked, " Has So-and-so been here? " would you 
say, " Yes, he was here ten hours ago ; we gave him 
a glass of milk ; he is in the forest, go after him and 
get him ; " or would you say, " The man is hid in 
the house now?" Men Bay, "Would you betray 
him ? Don't you think it is right to lie for bene- 
volence?" No, I do not. "Would you tell the 
truth to a robber, when the life of your children 
depended upon it ? " Probably not ; but that has 
nothing to do with the principle. I may be weak 
•enough to tell a lie ; but that does not justify a lie, 



50 THE WASTES AND 

nor me in telling it ; and when a man appeals to 
the weakness of a man to justify a lie, you do not 
advance in any way towards the truth. I hold that 
the hardest thing in this world is for a man habit- 
ually to tell the truth. A man who tells the truth 
is like a man who lives in a glass house, and every- 
body that goes by sees what he is doing there. A 
man that tells the truth has to be very symmetrical 
in his character; he has got to be really a good 
man, and righteous, or he cannot afford to tell the 
truth. 

Truth the Bond of Society. 

Now, the political economy of the matter is this, 
that lying disintegrates society. Men are united 
together in the great interests of human life by 
trust. On an average they believe when a man 
says a thing ; when he says he has done a thing 
they^take it for granted. We could not live if we could 
not believe in men. "William, have you deposited 
those cheques in the bank?" " Yes, sir, I have." 
"May be he has, may be he has not; I will go 
round to the bank and see." " Has my clerk 
deposited cheques for £1,000 in the bank to-day?" 
"Yes," says the cashier, "he has." "But there 
may be a collusion between him and some of the 
bank officers, I will go inside and see." "Is your 
cashier to be believed when he says my clerk has 
deposited d61,000 ? " If a man had to do all that cir- 
cumlocution in his business he would not have time 
to do anything else but to look round. We cannot . 
get organised, combined strength unless a man is 
trusted, and the moment a man is known not to be 
trusted there begins the process of separation, and 
the progress of all human life begins in the belief 
that men substantially tell the truth. Men say 
society is full of lies. Yes, it is full of lies. Thi?re 
is a great deal of lying in all sorts of business, ex- 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 51 

cept the pulpit; and the philosophy of that is at 
once exposed as a false philosophy in this, that if 
jlyingwere more common than speaking the truth, 
society would be like a heap of sand, it would 
fall apart. The cohesion is the belief in men's 
veracity. The fact is that a lie has to have a 
cutting edge of truth or it would not be worth 
anything. It is the truth that works a lie into any- 
thing like victory. On the street, in the shop, in the 
manufactory, on the ship, at home and abroad, the 
implication is that a man is to be relied upon for 
his word or bond, and if you take that away society 
goes back into original elements and is shipwrecked, 
and everything that tends to separate the confidence 
of man in man impedes business, and makes it more 
and more laborious. If you join to this dishonesty 
— lying and dishonesty — you double the weight of 
the armour that a man has to carry ; thicker walls 
are needed, multiplied watchers ; like the old armour 
of knights, that weighed more than a man and a 
horse together, society is obliged to amour itself. 
I have sometimes thought that if there might be 
a miracle in New York, and God should make every 
man honest and truthful, they would not know one 
another next day, and the hull would come up 
many a feet in the water. You may not believe 
it, but I tell you that the permanent prosperity oi 
society is to be derived not from the basilar faculties 
but from the caronal. All those influences, there- 
fore, that tend to make the violation of a man's 
word and pledge easy ought to be swept out of 
society. 

An Abject Superstition. 

Then there is the false notion that men are more 
likely to tell the truth under oath than they are 
without an oath. A man that will not tell the truth 
without an oath won't tell the truth with an oath. 
You cannot make a man honest by machinery. 



52 THE WASTES AND 

There has got to be established in him an auto- 
matic honesty, an honesty individual. Therefore, I 
do not believe in the oaths of our courts. In the 
old days of superstition, men believed that by a 
reference to arms on the battlefield God would 
always decide for the right. That has been ex- 
ploded, and duels and conflicts for the sake of truth 
are all gone in the lumber-room of heathendom, as 
well as the old superstition with regard to a man 
standing before a mysterious deity, and swearing on 
the penalty of his soul, when he did not believe he had 
a soul, and did not believe there was much penalty. 
And see how oaths have passed into disrepute by 
the mode of prescribing them. Here is an honest, 
simple-hearted man, who has never been in a court 
or through a trial ; he comes in rather tremulous , 
and goes in behind the witness box. See how the 
clerk administers the oath to him. He holds out 
the Bible as if there was some emanation from the 
Bible that would make him tell the truth. But 
some witnesses would not swear and stick to it on a 
Bible merely ; the Bible must have a cross on it ; 
that gives it extra sanctity. Thenhe is made to kiss 
it. Was there ever any superstition more abject 
than that ? Then the clerk gets up and says to the man 
who is waiting to be honest : " In the case of John 
Doe v. Richard Boe you swear — mumble, mumble , 
mumble, mumble." It gradually dawns on him that 
he is sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth. Then the judge and the 
lawyers on each side are determined he shall not 
tell the truth, and that he shall lie, and when he 
goes off the stand he does not know whether he is 
on his head or his feet. That is called sifting the 
evidence. 

A Manufactory of Lies. 
I do not believe in Custom House oaths. I do 
not believe in Custom Houses anyhow. I think 



BURDENS OF SOCIETY. 53' 

they are manufactories of lies. I have got to swear 
when I go back — I have felt like it many times, but 
I have got to do it — that I have nothing in my trunks 
or about me contrary to the Custom laws of my 
country. I know nothing about the Customs laws 
of my country ; I do not know whether they admit 
a jack knife. I am wearing all new clothes, so I 
can say I have nothing but what I wear. It is in- 
herent in the oath that it is morally weak. Every 
man who has to do with the Custom House has a 
clerk who swears for the firm, who goes down to the 
Custom House, and does the swearing there. These 
Custom House oaths are simply ridiculous. 

Ordination Oaths. 

But there is another kind of oath though not 
quite so frequent and perhaps not so demoralising, 
yet hardly less disgraceful, when a green young man 
fresh from the college or the seminary, who has 
had his theology put into him as sausages are filled, 
goes before the council, or the conference, or the 
convention, or whatever may be the machine, and 
takes oath that he will preach the doctrines of the 
confession, or of the creed as they have been inter- 
preted by the Church. For a year or two he does not 
know anything better than to go on doing it ; but, by- 
and-by, what with books and collateral light, and 
intercourse with men, and the progress of science, 
the man begins to have wider thoughts, and very 
soon he sees that he cannot preach on that doctrine, 
so he holds his tongue about it ; and there begins to 
rise from the horizon to him the bright and morning 
star — yea, it maybe the very Sun of Kighteousness ; 
but he has taken an oath that he will not preach 
anything but what is in the book, as if a book ever 
contained the Lord God Almighty and all creation. 
"What does he do ? He compromises and holds his 



54 THE WASTES AND 

tongue, or else the conditions of fellowship are such 
that he sacrifices everything that is dear to a man. 
All his roots in the past and all social affections bind 
him to this particular communion ; but for the sake 
of truth he suffers himself to be expatriated and cast 
out, and the world says : " If a man belongs to that 
denomination he ought to teach what the denomina- 
tion believes or leave it ; " as if there was nothing 
else than getting a salary, as if a man did not feel 
that the truth in his hands was the test of his alle- 
giance to Almighty God. Ordination oaths lay men's 
consciences under bondage, for I hold, and the world 
will yet agree to it, that a godly life is orthodox, and 
no orthodoxy that does not carry love behind it is 
orthodox. 

The Waste of Deunkenness. 

I pass on to the next waste, and I shall barely 
mention it and go forward, and that is drunkenness. 
I specify this because civilisation has developed the 
nerve forces of mankind, and there is a physiological 
law now affirmed by scientific men, that a regulated 
stimulus prevents the waste of the nerve matter 
which performs the function of life, that opium, 
hashish, brandy, alcoholic stimulants of every kind, 
and coffee and tea are, in moderation, nerve conser- 
vators, and that the danger lies not so much in the 
article, as in the unconscious increase until the 
stimulants narcotise the nerve. That is the philo- 
sophy that, as civilisation advances, men in the higher 
walks of life put forward. If a man can learn to 
love tobacco there is nothing on God's earth he can- 
not learn to love. Men are constantly seeking to 
reinforce nature in proportion as they are vigorous ; 
but others say it is all wrong, that cold water and 
plain bread are better. Every time you think or do 
anything a certain portion of the nerve is wasted in 



BT7BDENS OF SOCIETY. 55 

doing it ; and if there be something that makes it 
tougher in using it, that will explain the almost 
universal use of stimulants, and what we want to 
learn, if this be true, is to teach young men and old 
men where the lines of safety be. A man may be 
brought up in temperance, as I was ; until I was 
sixty jesus of age I never knew the taste of beer or 
of stimulants. Since I was sixty-five I have known 
something more — it is never too late to learn. I am 
none the less a temperance man, for all that. I 
look upon the use of intoxicants and stimulants by 
young men, men in health, as a waste, as well as a 
danger and a temptation. 

Proper Use of Stimulants. 

I would seek, not, however, by legislative 
prohibition, but by moral persuasion, to bring 
every man into a sound principle in regard to 
self-control in what he eats and drinks, for I do 
not believe there is any governing force that is 
equal to self-government, and it is self-govern- 
ment we should seek in every form of life. How is 
it that a young man goes out in society ? He has 
been a teetotaller at home, but he goes out into 
fashionable society ; they set before him wines ; 
little by little he begins to drink. There is a great 
art in drinking, and a bon vivant knows what it is, 
and he can say, " Young man, if you are going to 
take any of this kind, let me tell you how and 
when ; " but we do not dare put a young man to 
such instruction, so we let him go on and guzzle 
according to his own fancy. What we want to get 
is physiological knowledge and hygienic knowledge 
as to the proper use of stimulants. But men drink 
because they have an inherited appetite for drink, 
because they want to do two days' work in one, 
because they are of too slow and sluggish a tern- 



56 THE WASTES AND 

perament, and they want to make up their slow 
forces and wake up the inspiration of their mind ; 
or they drink because they are in good fellowship. 
There are a variety of reasons. The result is, 
drunkenness becomes wholesale in all our commu- 
nities, and the moment a man has gone beyond the 
line of temperance he has lest his place as a pro- 
ducer in society and is a waste and a burden, and 
every church and every legislation and every form 
of public sentiment should limit the use of intoxi- 
cants and teach men to be temperate, for there is 
no evil that is committing so much crime ; there is 
no evil that so populates the poorhouse, the gaol,, 
the . gallows ; there is no evil that takes away so 
much comfort from the home and makes so much 
misery therein ; there is no one evil under the sun 
that is so infernal as that of drunkenness. 



The Waste of Wae. 

The last of the burdens of society that I would 
trouble you with is war. This is simply animalism. 
I do not undertake to say that defensive wars, or 
other wars, are always morally wrong. As the 
world is constituted, force and physical force are 
quite necessary. You cannot drive the team with- 
out some goad, or some whip, or some rein, or 
some harness. The animal must be controlled by 
animal forces, for there is nothing else influences it, 
and men are yet animals largely, and when there- 
are insurrections, and riots, and plunderings of 
property, and aggressions upon the peace and life of 
their fellow men, there must be an arm stronger 
than their violence to hold them in. The theory 
that we are never to be allowed to use force would 
forbid police anywhere ; and to forbid the hand of 
strength for the protection of the community is to 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 57 

give a premium to violence and lawlessness. But 
look at the history of wars. The earth is red with 
blood. Look at the symbol of Great Britain — a 
lion ; look at the symbol of America — an eagle , 
look at the symbols of nations — leopards. Men 
have rightly considered that the symbol that typifies 
the national life should be borrowed from animal 
violence. I cannot say that the history of Great 
Britain would justify me in praising you for peace 
principles. I will admit that the tendency of 
British literature, and British religion and civility 
and polity, when men have been subdued, is benign, 
and develops a higher nationality everywhere, and 
that on her Colonies and possessions around the 
earth, she has bestowed an equitable government 
and a general procedure which is to the advantage 
of weak and dependent nations. But how came 
they weak and dependent ? 



The American War. 

In our own land I thank God we have been saved 
from war mostly, partly by our weakness, partly by 
the nature of our institutions, partly by our exemp- 
tion from the intercourse of nations ; but we have 
gone through the baptism of blood, and we have 
come out with a national debt of six million dollars, 
and every dollar of it represents the industry of 
men. This counts nothing of the waste by the 
burning of dwellings, the burning of crops, the 
burning of fences, the upsetting of society every- 
where. The whole South was made absolutely 
bankrupt by the war in which she asserted a false 
principle. I hold that there was never a people on 
earth so sincere and honest in their conflict as our 
Southern brethren ; I hold that they gave their last 
dollar, their last breath, and when they gave up 



58 THE WASTES AND 

there was nothing more with which to make re- 
sistance. I bear witness to them that as soon as 
they gave up they gave up thoroughly and came 
back into the Union, and are now inspired with 
Union principles as sincere as in the North. But 
this terrible internecine struggle was a waste of a 
million of men. At Gettysburg 40,000 men lay 
dead, wounded, or dying on both sides. 

Europe, a Camp. 

Can anything be considered more horrible than 
the history of European war ? The. wranglings of 
lions and tigers in the wilderness, the fights of 
the bear, or the cruelties of the shark that kill 
not to consume, but for savage abstractiveness 
— human nature has been more cruel than all 
the animal creation. The days are coming when I 
think the best men will not be called out for stand- 
ing armies. To-day Europe is armed to the teeth; 
indeed, the whole nation is a camp. All Germany — 
it is not an army that they raise ; it is an army 
that they are ; and substantially that is the con- 
dition of France ; and Italy, newly brought into 
the communion of the saints of nations, is still 
weighing down her population by the expenses for 
the army and navy. There is not a nation except 
Switzerland that dare lay down their arms. Yet 
they are all Christian nations. They would all be 
mortally offended if you said they were not 
members of the community of the faith. Yet 
here comes in Christ's revelation of God's love, 
that rather than men should die He gave His only 
begotten Son to save them. Here comes that grand 
revelation of the eternities, that the test of love is 
how much men will suffer for another. Yet men 
are fighting for the love, slaughtering men for the 
peace of society, for the sake of obtaining the reign 



BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 59 

of the empire of love. Was there ever such a spec- 
tacle presented to mankind ? 



A Woed of Encotteagement. 

The general drift of many of you will be to say 
that I have given such a bad picture of the actual 
goings on of society that it discourages you. No, I 
have not. On the contrary,! think the world never 
was so much advanced as it is to-day. I think that 
it is the sensibility and consequence of this advance 
that makes the picture so vivid and so repulsive to 
you. I think there is more of thought for the com- 
mon people, for their external life, for their instruc- 
tion, a larger conception of their rights, and more 
and more institutions that tend to fortify and extend 
the rights of the mass of mankind. I think there 
is coming on gradually a time when war itself will 
begin to be throttled, and in that day may my land 
be found leading, for the inducements and tempta- 
tions to us are a thousandfold less than to any 
nation in Europe, and with us, and behind us — for 
there is no backing that I could covet like the back- 
ing of my mother country, speaking my language, 
from whose literature I learned, from whose religion 
I received inspiration, from whose legislation and 
sense of justice has sprung all that there is on the 
western hemisphere — may Great Britain stand, and 
back America up in every step that she should take 
to make justice and equity comport w T ith peace, 
and destroy war everywhere. Professor Guyot says 
that there are three periods in the growth of a 
plant : the first is the longest and the most obscure 
— growth by the root ; the second period is much 
accelerated — growth by the stem ; and the third 
and fastest of all is the growth by the flower and 
the fruit. I take it this civilised part of the world 



60 THE WASTES AND BUEDENS OF SOCIETY. 

has been growing by the root through the centuries, 
and that we have come unto a time when the world 
is growing by the stem faster and faster, but that 
just before us in our children's day, and may be in 
our own, society will burst out into blossom and 
begin to bear the fruits of righteousness as we have 
never seen it do in days that are gone. Take no 
counsel, then, of crouching fear, still less of misan- 
thropic cowardice. Take courage of this, there is 
a God, and He has time enough, and is not obliged, 
as man is, to run quickly through the offices of the 
building of His providence. He can wait through 
the ages, and He can wait through the junctures ; 
but He is building, He is building, and that which 
His hand undertakes no man may long hinder, and 
by-and-by I would that I might behold Him< There 
shall be no man that shall have need to say to his 
brother, " Know the Lord?" for all men shall know 
Him from the least unto the greatest. ' I shall be- 
hold Him, not here but there, in the midst of the 
rejoicing host ; I shall understand that which to-day 
is an enigma, and I shall see the accomplishment 
of that in the midst of which I have striven, for 
which tears have been shed in ocean streams, for 
which blood has flowed through the race and through 
all time ; and the emancipation of man from his 
animal conditions shall be achieved before the race 
dies from off the face of the earth, and the glory of 
the Lord shall fill the earth as the waters fill the 
sea. 



CONSCIENCE. 



IT is not my purpose to-night to enter upon the 
discussion of the question, How did man 
become man ? To that inquiry there are many 
answers. It is not, as a part of that inquiiy, my 
purpose, to-night, to ask how the moral sense was 
developed originally in primitive man ; it is an 
obscure field of inquiry, and we have, as yet, no 
satisfactory guiding light. But man exists, an intel- 
lectual, moral, social, and physical creature, and it 
is of man as he is that I shall speak. Conscience 
exists ! No matter how it came to exist, it exists ! 
Now what it is, how it operates, what are its 
varieties, what is the method of its cultivation — 
these topics will be enough for all the patience that 
you have to-night. 

What it is. 

And in the first place, conscience is not a separate 
intellectual faculty. Moral sense may be said to be 
a complex state, but conscience, in the ordinary 
acceptation of that term, is not intellect. There be 
many who suppose that when God created man He 
infixed in him a little mind of His own sort, 
namely, one to discern what was right from what 
was wrong, what was good from what was bad, and 
that on every occasion there is springing from this 



G2 CONSCIENCE. 

witness in man a discernment of right and wrong. 
Nothing can be further from fact than this, for if 
there was a Divine constitution by which men 
distinguish right from wrong upon presentation, 
how is it that the same thing, and at different times, 
is differently pronounced upon in each man? and 
how is it that men themselves differ right alongside 
of each other ? How is it that there is every degree 
of variation if there w T as a determinate faculty to 
tell the man what was right and what was wrong ? 
And so all those phrases must be taken as figurative 
— that it is God's vicegerent, that it is a witness, 
that it is a judge — all those phrases for common 
speech have passed, but they are bad for philosophy. 
Conscience, then, is an emotion. Emotions, except 
in the very highest condition, nor even then accurately 
— emotions do not think. They inspire thinking, 
they colour thinking, they have much to do in deter- 
mining a man's judgment, and much to do in finding 
out the truth through the intellect; nevertheless, 
emotions do not think. They are moral states which, 
when the intellect, thinking for them, presents facts 
or truths, respond with certain definite kinds of feel- 
ing; and conscience, like every other emotion, i& 
dependent for its activity, as pleasurable or painful, 
upon the foregoing declaration of the intellect of 
every individual. We hear of an " educated con- 
science." All consciences are educated in the mea- 
sure in which they are right at all ; they all act 
under some foregoing decision of the intellect itself. 
It is subject to the law of all emotions, which give 
distinctive pleasure or pain upon presentation of the 
truths or facts by the intellect. 

Its Belatiori to the Intellect. 

Though but an emotion, we have already intimated 
that, like all others, it indirectly has great power 



CONSCIENCE. 63 

upon the intellect. The mind perceives colour. 
"Where the organ of colour is large the artist sees it 
everywhere, in every condition and variation ; where 
the emotion or the perception of colour is small in 
the individual the artist is dry, and his pictures have 
only forced and artificial colour. Where the organ 
of rnirthfulness — one of the most precious gifts of 
God in this vale of tears — where this is bright and 
cheerful, why, the understanding or the perceptive 
intellect sees occasion for mirth everywhere. All 
things are sparkling to him, even sorrows have their 
glistening side ; even anger itself finds itself met in 
a way that quite turns its edge. And so it comes to 
pass that the man that has it gets through life more 
comfortably, more cheerfully, more hopefully, for that 
matter ; whereas there be other men in whom the 
organ of rnirthfulness has either been extinguished 
or never engendered, and they " do not see anything 
in that," nor do they see anything in anything in 
that direction. So, then, the existence in men of 
powerful emotions determines very largely the judg- 
ment — and here let me say that, while it is generally 
said in science that the intellect must be free from 
all colour of the emotions, it is true in so far as 
number is concerned, so far as physical facts are 
concerned. The investigation of natural science 
must be colourless, but, in so far as social and moral 
truths are concerned, I declare that no man can 
approximate them, and certainly not understand 
them, except he has the colour of the emotions 
behind his intellect. It is indispensable to such 
circumstances. The same thing is true in regard to 
all the emotions. He that has large caution sees 
danger ; he that has small stumbles into it before 
he realises it. He that has large fear is perpetually 
discerning the occasions of fear or the possibilities. 
He that has large hope, all the heaven is in blossom 
all the time with him ; and so it comes that feeling 

Q 



64 CONSCIENCE. 

acts upon the intellect, but the intellect itself brings 
the occasions for the feeling to develop itself in the 
world. 

What Makes Bight and Wrong. 

Now, how does the intellect know what is right 
and what is wrong ? "Whence does it supply itself 
with this critical knowledge ? Just as it knows 
physical quality — by acquired or b} 7- transmitted 
experience. I do not undertake to say that there is 
no abstract and concrete right and wrong in the 
universe, but I do undertake to say that in the scope 
of human experience there is nothing that is right 
and nothing that is wrong per se, and that all things 
are right or wrong by the consequences which ensue 
or by the motives which impel, and that in and of 
themselves all things are right or wrong according 
to these rules. Is not murder wrong? If I 
plunge a knife into a man I am a murderer — unless I 
am a surgeon. The act is the same, the moral 
character very different. Now right and wrong may 
be a thing abstract and perfect, but human know- 
ledge of it is experimental, gradual, and empirical, 
and the rightest things to-day are wrong to-morrow 
if by "to-day" you mean this age and by "to- 
morrow " the next. For our knowledge is all green, 
it is all in the bud, and the blossom may disappoint 
all our speculations as to what the bud will come 
to, and the blossom itself may disappoint all our 
ideas of what the fruit will be. And all our know- 
ledge in that regard considering the universal and 
the unfolding future, it may all be said to be green 
as yet. We " see through a glass darkly," not 
merely upwards but parallel and level and every- 
where. That would be wrong to a child that it was 
taught was wrong. Why, there have been natures 
that believed in lying, and they exist yet, but are not 
ranked as moral virtues, only as permissible faults, 



CONSCIENCE. 65 

but there were days when it was counted one of the 
witnesses of manhood. They were a keen set of 
fellows in the mythology of antiquity up there in 
heaven. Homer's hero is Ulysses, the cunning, the 
slippery, the deceitful. That in that time was con- 
sidered one of the qualities of a true manhood, but 
to-day no man should dare call himself a man who 
voluntarily or intentionally deceives anything or 
anybody. In Sparta it was a virtue to steal if you 
<?ould do it without detection — it was a kind of 
dexterity. And so the child is taught what is right 
and what is wrong, and for the child that is right 
that it is taught to be right, and that is wrong 
which it is taught is wrong, and there is no moral 
sense that is acting in his mind in the earlier periods 
and before reflection qualifies instruction. 

The Evolution of Conscience. 

Now, ages of experience have laid the foundation 
for a very general conception of right and wrong, 
even among the lower tribes of the human family. 
When men began to live together it may be said 
that they were perpetually trying to find the way of 
living together peacefully and happily, and each man 
tried to make all the rest serve him socially. Little 
by little he found out that that was not the disposi- 
tion of the majority, because every other fellow was 
trying the same thing ; and so it came to pass that 
there had to be some sort of compromise, and little 
by little the art of living together with some degree 
of consideration of the rights of each other in a' 
very limited sphere was wrought out in the expe- 
rience of men. And so it came to pass that little 
by little it was found not to be to the convenience 
of men that stealing should go on, as there were 
rights of property finally that were developed; and 
little by little it was not right and convenient for a 



66 CONSCIENCE. 

man's tongue to swing through space without any 
regard to local limitation and condition ; the most 
difficult of all the acquired rights was that — a right 
using of the tongue. Why, it was a remote idea. 
When you go to the Ten Commandments you find 
there said, "Thou shalt not steal," that way hack 
in the era of time ; but it was laid down before men 
ever came to that general conviction that should 
formulate in this maxim, " Thou shalt not steal."' 
The human family had travelled a great many ages, 
and many, many, many long reaches before they 
could declare that honesty was a virtue and com- 
mendable. 

Tra7ismitted Experience. 

Now, when a child is born in the family he finds 
everything fixed before he was born. He had not a 
choice whether he should be born or not, and he 
had not the pick as to who should be his father and 
mother, nor as to where he was to live nor how he 
was to live, nor anything about it. He was born an 
ignorant little — wretch. As he begins to develop he 
has no idea what to do with his hands — he has to 
learn that ; and he has no idea what to do with his 
feet — he has to learn that, too ; and he has no idea 
what to do with his tongue when he is not sucking 
sugar or something of that kind. Everything has 
got to be acquired. But he is born into a family 
where there was foregoing experience, transmitted 
experience, accumulated experience; and the child 
begins to find itself pressed here, pressed there, run 
against here, and run against there, and thus things 
assume by-and-by the form of right aud wrong. 
He did not know that fire would burn until he tried 
it ; he ascertained that rapidly. He did not know 
that it was wrong for the older boys to thump the 
younger ones, but he began to learn it after a very 
short experience. He did not know that it was 



CONSCIENCE* 67 

wrong to snatch and appropriate, but parental dis- 
cipline very soon opened a new fountain in his 
mind, a knowledge of that ; and so the child in the 
family learns how to live in the family with respect 
to the rights of the other children, and with respect 
to obedience to lawful authority. All these ideas 
are not born with him, they were developed 
in him little by little, and that which when 
he is six years old is wrong to him when he was 
only a two-year-old was not wrong to him ; he had 
the instincts of the animal, and not the considera- 
tion or the knowledge of an adult human being. 
Well, then, the child grows up, and gets out of the 
family into the neighbourhood. The same thing 
takes place. He finds a public sentiment, he finds 
& schedule of things right and wrong; he did not 
originate them, he acquired them little by little. 
And when his sphere was still larger, the afore 
determined paths of human life were also moral 
principles ; rude it may be, subject to great modifica- 
tion it may be, nevertheless it was through experi- 
ence that he learned in the person, in the family, 
in the neighbourhood, and in the civic rela- 
tion what was right and what was wrong. Now, 
when this had gone on for a certain time 
and men had become riper, there arose men that 
could group together facts and infer common prin- 
ciple underlying them all. Generalisation took 
place. And so men came to the idea that injustice, 
was wrong ; everybody believes that. But what is 
injustice? there's the puzzle. Everybody believed 
that honesty was right ; but what is honesty in the 
critical combinations of life? That is the crucial 
test with multitudes. Everybody came to believe 
that purity was right ; in other words, there were 
certain great generalisations which took place, and 
ihen men began to learn what was right and what 
was wrong no longer by hereditary experience, but 



68 CONSCIENCE. 

"by the application of ascertained principles to the 
conduct of men. Some things were permitted. 
Men said, " That is not just," and, therefore, they 
determined that such and such actions, according to 
the principle of justice, were not right, and so on 
through the whole category. 

What is Moral Intuition ? 

But there is one step further in the develop- 
ment of moral sense — viz., that of the intuitional 
force? What is intuitional force? It is a word 
very much used, " moral intuition.' ' What defi- 
nition can I give to it? I cannot give any 
definition to it, but some illustrations of it. It 
exists in a lower or higher degree not in regard 
to right and wrong alone, but in regard to almost 
every form of thought and feeling. Where any 
faculty exists in great strength, or where under 
particular excitement it is carried above the level 
of its ordinary unfolding, it becomes luminous in 
this sense — that it throws a light before reflection 
upon the path of reflection. Before thought it 
guides thought, so that all the way through life 
we find that there is this intermingling on the 
part of superior organisations or on the part 
of ordinary organisations in their superior moments 
— revelations made to them. The lower forms 
of mind are simply receptive. The intermediate 
state of mind is simply that of lower creation ; the 
higher conditions of our mind are luminous condi- 
tions ; exhortations, promises, spring out of them,, 
foresights spring out of them. Take the ordinary 
case of music. A man who has in him the genius 
of music, standing in the midst of an orchestra of 
one hundred performers, discerns discord — a half 
tone, or discord even less — and he not only sees it 
in the vast measure and movement of various in- 



CONSCIENCE. 09 

strunients, and in the progress of the^ thought 
through sound he not only perceives it instantly, 
but he sees where it came from ; he knows the very 
instrument that produced it. I might stand there 
years, and never dream of it. A man has the 
artist's temperament, and he sees a picture by 
Titian just brought to light, and stands before it in 
almost adoration. "Oh, what colour ! Why, it 
seems to flood the picture through and through ! " 
A rude countryman coming in behind him stands 
and looks at it. "Why, I don't see no colour! 
Why, I've got a picture at home twice as yaller as 
that and twice as red ! " There are a great many 
such persons. It is said that ignorant people love 
strong colour ; that is not the explanation. Igno- 
rant people require strong colours before they see 
any colour at all ; but the sensitive organisation of 
the artist discerns the lowest tone and all the inter- 
mediate grades, the whole schedule of colour. That 
which to a common man seems as if it was not very 
rude, to a sensitive and exquisitely loving nature 
is painful to the last degree. It is the higher 
intuition, the higher judgment of the finer and 
the larger faculties of the mind or in the larger 
organisation, — it is out of these that come what we 
call intuitions, and in the lower forms they pervade 
society. Men judge whether it is safe to trust a 
man by looking at him, and in that regard we 
discern what is not discernible. Mary says : " Now, 
John, I hope you are not going to do business with 
that man; I don't like him." "Why, my dear, did 
you ever see him?" "No, I never did." "Well, 
how do you know anything about him? " " I don't 
know, only I would not trust him, and I hope you 
won't trust him." " Well, I shall trust him; " and 
in about three months he comes back, and some 
night says, in rather a modest and crestfallen 
way : " Well, Mary, you was right about that man." 



70 CONSCIENCE. 

" John, I knew I was right ! " Well, she had the 
perception — I suppose everybody has an atmosphere 
— chemistry has not analysed that question yet ; but 
a pure and sensitive woman standing within the 
atmosphere of a rude, deceitful, or coarse man feels 
the atmosphere of him. Now, moral intuitions 
belong to that class of experience, so that there be 
many men that won't do things although everybody 
else thinks it right ; they won't, there is something 
in them that revolts at it. There are the high-toned 
and the common and the low and the vulgar all the 
way up in every scale of every kind in human life. It 
is from this practical experience and teaching when 
we are young, coming to a state of mind in which 
we can apply a principle to courses of conduct and 
moral intuitions, the highest of all — it is from these 
sources that the intellect knows and teaches the 
emotion or conscience what is right and what is 
wrong. 

What Determines its Character. 

The next point that I wish to make is the fact, a 
subtle one but a very important one, namely, the 
fact that conscience acts within the mind according 
to the law of companionship. A man is said to be 
known by the company he keeps. That is very true 
outwardly, it is more true inwardly. A man's 
character is determined by the company that his 
faculties choose to keep. If you bisect a man and call 
the under part basilar, animal, and the upper part 
social and moral, then the question of which way 
your higher faculties tend determines very much the 
man's character. If, for example, a man has a con- 
stitutional mirthfulness, and it has by some way or 
other learned to love the companionship of the 
animal that is in man, you will see that his wit is 
vulgar ; you will see him finding wit where only the 
phosphorescent light of decay makes it shine. If a 



CONSCIENCE. 71 

man has a conscience that works towards fear, in 
partnership with fear, you will find it always either a 
timid conscience, or a cautious conscience, or a con- 
science that has bad company in the bottom of the 
brain, as it were. If in the distribution of partner- 
ships that are formed within the mind you find men 
that have wit, and it works in connection with com- 
bativeness and destructiveness, it will be sarcastic, it 
will be bitter, it will be caustic, whereas, if mirth- 
fulness works in the direction of the imagination 
and of the intellect it will be bright and cheerful and 
hopeful. If a man's conscience works with fear he 
becomes superstitious ; if it works with hope he 
shoots in the other direction continuously, and it is 
to the last degree of importance that men should 
know what the conscience is about inside of them. 
There be many men, we know that they are con- 
scientious, but they are morose, they are ugly ; their 
conscience has got into bad company, it is the animal 
in them that is inspiring it and directing it, and there 
be men on the other hand whose conscience is lumi- 
nous, and it works with benevolence and with 
hope, and they are radiant. Now the world's 
history has shown more conscience in the direction 
of severity, in the direction of law, in the direction 
of wrath. The fact is, that as the world has gone 
hitherto in its higher spheres, conscience has been 
a gladiator and a murderer, not because it was 
bad to have, but because it was bad to have 
in combination with the animal passions and 
faculties. Were there ever more conscientious 
men than the men that burned men, broke them on 
the wheel ; that everywhere turned this world 
through the profession of religion into an aceldama? 
Conscience ! they had conscience enough, but it 
was a perverted conscience working with bad 
inspirations from the lower elements in their 
nature, and so it comes to pass that men are all 



72 CONSCIENCE. 

the time riding their consciences to the devil. 
There is hardly any strong man that has not got 
a conscience for what he has to do. Multitudes of 
men backbite, it is their "duty" to do it. Multitudes 
of men there are that detract, multitudes of men 
that slander, multitudes of men that say, " I have a 
conscience for the truth, the truth at all hazards ; " 
they never seem to have read their Bible through. 
The Apostle says, " Speaking the truth in love," 
and the original is stronger than that — " truthing it 
in love." But there be many men that truth it in 
bitterness, in envy, in revenge, in anger, and in all 
malice and uncharitableness. They have con- 
sciences — alas, yes — but they are like bull-dogs 
sitting at the door of their souls, and snarling at 
every one who comes who does not belong to the 
family. 

I remark, further, every age is judged by its 
successors. The child is judged by the man, that is, 
the ripe judges the unripe. The infant race is 
judged by the developed race. Permissions and 
forbiddings increase with development. There are 
many things that an early race may do that a later 
race may not ; there are many things than an early 
race cannot do and that a later race can, and there- 
fore is under obligation to do. There is no absolute 
law, it is always relative to knowledge and capacity, 
the line of rectitude and of duty. Less animal 
power is permitted in the later developments, more 
moral power; less liberty of the animal, more 
liberty of the reason and of the moral sense. 
Things are not right now, therefore, which were 
right once — right only in the sense that outlives. 
It is right for a child to walk pit-a-pat, but it would 
be absurd for a full-stretched man to do so. As the 
race develops they cannot do any better than the}^ 
can, and the law applied to races is the very law 
that we apply incessantly to the family. And it 



CONSCIENCE. 73 

works humanely and wisely, and yet there is a. 
strong impression that the further back you go into 
antiquity, primitive and simple man, the nearer you 
come to the right rules of life. That lies at the root 
of all Rousseau's nonsense and of that school of 
which he is the genius. But it did not stop there. 
There are multitudes of men that think in regard 
to religion that the early saints were the nearest to 
heaven. There were some of them that were very 
near to heaven, hut there are a good many early 
saints that would not he tolerated now. Relative to 
their conscience and their knowledge it may be said 
that they certainly had put forth an amount of right 
intention and of will power ; they had put forth an 
amount which did exalt them above their fellows ; 
but if they were brought into our time I know not 
what would become of them. 

The Authority of the Bible. 

Judge the question of slavery by this standard. 
In the remote days, the history of which is recorded 
in the Bible, men without rebuke were made slaves ; 
and it was no very bad thing either, according to the 
master, that is to say, the slave was not so far 
from the average condition of the son as to make 
him feel his inferiority. But just so soon as they 
began to apply the law of humanity to the slave he 
became too expensive, and Jewish slavery died out 
because it became burdensome. Now in the great 
controversy through which we have happily passed,, 
and a fiery amen has been pronounced upon it — in 
that great controversy, one of the strong arguments 
was the Bible tolerated slavery, and therefore 
slavery cannot be wrong. Well, I hold that the 
Bible tolerated, that is, it is the history of Divine 
toleration of things, because God " winked at them," 
as the Apostle says, in the early days. If slavery 



74 CONSCIENCE. 

were right four thousand years ago, it is an 
infamous shame if it is right still. Men have not 
Jmown what to do with the Old Testament. I 
should not either if I believed in the doctrine 
of absolute special inspiration. I believe that the 
Bible is inspired; but how? It is the record of 
God's inspiration of the human race, not the inspira- 
tion of the letter. God did not say all these things, 
did He? " Oh ! " some one says, "certainly He 
did." Did He tell Solomon to take eight hundred 
concubines, and I don't know how many wives? 
He took them and the record was made, and no 
comment. Did He tell Jacob to go and cheat his 
brother in collusion with his dishonest mother? 
And when he had choused him from his birthright, 
with certainly want of fraternal feeling and the 
violation of all the ordinary rules of family affection, 
when he had cheated his dear old dying father, was 
he right or wrong ? There is no condemnation put 
upon it in the Old Testament. There it stands, the 
naked fact, and after he had to run away, and had 
got a certain distance, he laid down on a pillow of 
stone, and angels seemed to ascend and de- 
scend before him, and he had a communication 
from on high that he should be made a great man 
and a great nation. Not a word of rebuke. There 
was no allusion to the bow that had shot him out 
into exile. He was a criminal, and if he had lived 
in our day he would have gone to the penitentiary. 
And then he got to Laban and served him. Why, 
they bought their wives in those days, and he got 
cheated in the bargain, and in order to make it up 
tried again and got another; and there it stands 
recorded without a notation or exclamation mark, or 
anything of the kind. It is a faithful record of what 
men did in that early age. If it was right for men 
to hold slaves to-day because they held them in 
Judea, or in any part of Palestine, then it is, 



CONSCIENCE. 75 

right to-day for men to imitate the cunning, the 
lying and deceit of Jacob, and I think a good many- 
men rather think so too. In those early days we 
can hardly read with any tolerance the account of 
the horrible slaughter of men by the direction of 
the Prophets, hewing them to pieces, and those 
Psalms that call on God to destroy their enemies 
and brain their children. Hideous, horrible ! If 
you measure it by what we have found out of 
humanity and rectitude there is nothing to be said 
on the subject, and the man that believes in the 
verbal inspiration of Scripture, the old mechanical 
theory, he cannot stand up before the infidel who 
throws it in his face. But when you come to under- 
stand the state of society, when you begin with the 
fact that a man was not worth anything in those 
days much more than an ox or an ass or a sheep — one 
skilful mechanic to-day is worth ten thousand men 
in the remote antiquity ; the value of the individual 
has increased the duties of those round about him 
toward him ;— when you consider that it was life or 
death when tribes and nations met, and when the 
conqueror took possession of certain captives, either 
they had got to be slaves or they had got to be slain, 
and they most all of them chose the former ; — when, 
therefore, you read in the Old Testament Scripture 
how men were slaughtered by the wholesale, how 
could they have done anything else ? They were 
savages, both sides, substantially. They had the 
seed which through the long ages has unfolded into 
morality and into the higher forms of religion ; but 
in these early ages it was but a seed form. They 
had no jails, they had no armies with which they 
could protect themselves against these men. It was 
either let them go back and make war on us or put 
them out of harm's way. I do not approve antiquity 
at all, but men had to creep before they could walk, 
and the record of it, if rightly used, is a very powerful 



76 CONSCIENCE. 

argument of the gradual unfolding, under Divine 
providence and inspiration, of the human race in 
•every direction in society. The Bible is evidently a 
history of moral evolution in all its earlier records. 

The Savagism of Piety. 

The same may he true in regard to the early 
•Churches. Men think the further back you go 
towards the Apostles the nearer you come to the 
truth. I say the further you go away the nearer you go 
to the truth. The Apostles may be said to have had 
a luminous sense of many of the truths, but not of 
the whole scope of the truths in their application to 
the family and to civil society, and to all the living 
and practical questions we see to-day. And when 
you come to the saints, I hold that a self-denying, 
Christian woman, rearing fifteen children in a family, 
is a better saint than any that are in any of the 
niches of all the ancient cathedrals. Yet these 
were ideals that in the age were luminous, and led 
men on to a higher and nobler sphere little by little. 
But their conscience had not yet been enlarged ; the 
line of life, with all its multifarious duties, had not 
been developed. There was a period of what might 
be called the savageism of piety in the early Church. 
Some men are trying to revive it again. They are 
trying to build churches now-a-days that will repre- 
sent the primitive Church. Why, you might as well 
nndertake to revive John Baptist, and go into the 
wilderness and eat locusts and wild honey, and go 
with your loins girt about in the hope that you 
would reform society. John Baptist would have 
made a poor advocate on the subject of Temperance 
or political reform, or anything of that kind. He 
was a very good man in his day and in the sphere 
allotted to him by Divine Providence, but we do 
not imitate him. Because a child wore a suit of 



CONSCIENCE. 77 

clothes suited to him when he was five years old, 
what should you think of him when he was forty 
trying to get those clothes on again. Has the world 
come to nothing? Have there been no develop- 
ments, no enlargements, no dropping of some 
things in order to take to others ? 

The Conditions of Reform. 

Let me apply this view to manners and customs, 
to laws and institutions. Ours is said to be a re- 
formatory age, and there are reformers that say, 
"Eight is right, wrong is wrong ; there is no use in 
undertaking to mince matters at all : if it is right 
you are to go it, if it is wrong you are peremptorily 
to stop it." Now, you cannot handle mankind nor 
society in that generic and rude way. If a piece of 
stone is to be handled, the stone has got no will, and 
has to go where the dynamic force compels it to go. 
But men have got wills, and you cannot manage 
them so easily ; and if in any community you desire 
to change the current, you have got to dig new 
canals, you have got to lay new foundations, and 
men do not come into those things suddenly and 
easily. If a nation is vital, if its cerebration is high 
and its bodily nature is relatively under control of 
its brain nature, you can go much more rapidly ; but 
if a community are slow thought ed, slow moulded, 
you cannot make them go fast, and all attempts, 
especially in modern society, to change, to correct 
great evils, to introduce new and improved methods, 
must conform themselves to the law of the unfold- 
ing of conscience, and the unfolding of conscience 
is obliged to follow the law of increasing knowledge. 
The intellect must be educated and then the moral 
sense appealed to, and in proposing all legislation 
and all reforms this is to be borne in mind, that you 
cannot in a great community make laws or reforms 



78 CONSCIENCE. 

faster than the average conscience of that com- 
munity. And all legislation and all reforms do not 
follow the highest thought nor the nohlest impulses, 
nor do they follow the lowest. They take the average 
of society, and all reformatives must seek ahout the 
middle or average ground ; and yet there be many 
stout ordinary reformers that say, " This is not 
right ; it is a half-way measure." You cannot get a 
whole measure except by first getting a half-way 
measure, and when a community can have developed 
in it in any age a new conception, a loftier style of 
model, and can be persuaded into it, they have 
already advanced very much further than we had 
supposed that they had advanced, for any reforma- 
tion, or any great addition to the stores of society, 
must come along the line of the majority. So then, 
instead of fiery fuss and fury, instead of denouncing, 
instead of premature methods, educate, educate ; 
and while you educate, wait; and he that is not 
ready to wait is not ready to be a reformer. 
I may, perhaps, in passing, say a word in regard 
to the manners and customs of the community in 
which we live. As society is made up of the 
young, of the weak-minded, of the better-minded, 
of the middle-class, you cannot expect that they 
will have an intellectual discernment of right and 
wrong. The great under-mass, they must take 
the manners, customs, and laws which have 
been found out for them by the generations 
preceding. Because you see that manners and 
customs are capable of great development and of 
much higher improvement and larger liberties, 
because you can see it it does not follow that others 
can see it, and therefore to ridicule the habits and 
the lower feelings in regard to methods, customs, 
etiquette, the laws of society, is to put out the only 
light that they have got to guide them by. For it 
may be said in regard to the community at large, 



CONSCIENCE. 79 

not one man in ten guides himself by his own inde- 
pendence, intelligence, and conscience; he guides 
himself by the institutions, the history, the collec- 
tive wisdom of society about him, and by a great 
many influences that he himself does not recognise ; 
and if you put a man upon his sole independence he 
must be a very superior man, and superior men do 
not march in battalions* 

The Department Conscience. 

Perhaps I shall further illustrate the ideas thus 
far distended if I give you a kind of portrait gallery 
of consciences. There are a great many consciences 
in this world, and the first is what may be called a 
department conscience — that is to say, there are men 
that have great sensibility of right and wrong 
respecting relations in life and department, and non- 
generically. Thus a man is serving a church, and 
the church itself is operose and multitudinous, and 
filled up with a great many things, and the man has 
a very active conscience in everything that belongs 
to church life ; but he has very little conscience for 
family life — does not hesitate at all to make people 
wretched all round about him. The law of love is 
trodden under foot frequently, and the man has no 
conscience at all ; but the moment he gets within 
the cathedral, off goes his hat, and the man now 
says, " I do not dare to deviate from sacred custom." 
He has got a conscience for the cathedral, but none 
for the house. A great many men have a conscience 
for Sunday, but none for Monday. A great many 
men have a conscience for one particular profession 
in which they are, and outside of that very little. 
There are men that, in regard to the private life, 
have no conscience at all ; but on being advanced 
to public office and station, in that they have a good 
deal of conscience. And there are a great many 

E 



80 CONSCIENCE. 

men that have no conscience there, although per- 
sonally they have a very considerable one. There 
are multitudes of men that would not do by a 
neighbour what they will do by a party — not for 
their right hand, for all the moral law is upset in 
the fury of a party. To lie is wrongs as between 
man and man ; but not to lie when it is your party 
that is going to gain by it is considered to be fas- 
tidiousness that is not very reputable. 

The Microscopic Conscience. 

Then there is what might be called the microscopic 
conscience : it is a conscience that concerns itself 
principally about minute things, none for broad, 
large views, has no momentum in it, no trusting of 
itself, without which a man is but a poor creature — 
invertebrate. A man ought to have a stride, not a 
pit-a-pat step, and there are multitudes of persons 
that are looking at little bits of things all the day 
long, little events going before and going behind, but 
in no large movement in right directions trusting 
themselves. I hold that as it is with the rail-car, so 
it is with the ship, when once the motion is im- 
pelled the momentum is of vast importance. And 
in society a man that is all the time stopping to see 
whether he is doing right or not, and analysing his 
thoughts and his motives and his feelings without 
any knowledge of how to analyse ; the man that is 
anxious because he did not know but he may have 
said something to day ; he is like a man that is so 
anxious that he stops his watch every few minutes 
to see whether it is going. 

The Msthetical Conscience. 

Then there is what may be called the sesthetical 
conscience; that is to say, men think that to be 



CONSCIENCE. 81 

Tight which is charming, beautiful, harmonious, 
delicious to their higher sensibilities, and, on the 
other hand, they hold that a thing that is ragged 
and coarse and vulgar cannot be right, and con- 
science runs with the elements of the beautiful. It 
ought to ; but it ought to run with all sorts as well, 
high or low. There be many men that think that a 
rude congregation, sitting like a pioneer meeting in 
in our "Western country, on logs, and singing with 
cracked voices and intoning the sermons through 
the nose— they cannot imagine that God should be 
pleased with such worship as that. They were 
brought up under the sound of the organ, they 
heard the law reverberating through a noble build- 
ing and all the arches, and all the people were well 
dressed, and they, all of them, were intelligent and 
educated, and they despise that sort of worship. 
But if it were genteel, and if the congregation was 
largely made up of rich men and influential citizens, 
and if the minister was only another form of music, 
and everything "went bland and smooth and was 
Tespectable, why, they would say : " Of course that 
church is orthodox ; that church is a good church • 
everything is right there." They have got an 
aesthetic conscience. These are persons that would 
.have refused to listen to John. 

The Superstitions Conscience. 

> Then there is what may be called the supersti- 
tious conscience. Superstition is an imaginary 
thing which, nevertheless, acts upon the minds of 
men, inspiring fear or hope or what not. Multi- 
tudes of men, and that just in proportion as the 
simplicity of Divine Providence is left out of their 
knowledge, believe that the forces of Nature and all 
manner of combinations of things— these all have 
_power m them, and they are in bondage. Super- 



82 CONSCIENCE. 

stitioD is largely dying out now, but at the time of 
the Beformation, and in the period of the Puritans, 
the heavens are not so full of stars as men's minds 
were of superstition upon things that were nonen- 
tities. I think there is a little pleasure in supersti- 
tion ; I have got but very little of it, but I wish I 
had a very little more — a kind of a pocket supersti- 
tion. I remember as a boy that I had heard it said 
that if a man sees the new moon over his right 
shoulder that is good luck all the month, and the con- 
sequence is I never see the new moon over any other 
shoulder ; for, whatever may be my posture, I twirl 
round so quick that the moon does not know it, and 
the consequence is I do have good luck every month. 
"Well, superstition of this kind — I could rehearse 
multitudes of them that fill the minds of men with 
more or less of terror. These persons do not believe 
that God rules. They believe that God has arranged 
it so that thirteen at the table is dangerous to some- 
body. They believe that God vacated His authority 
over Friday in order that the devil might take 
charge of that day. 

The " Sacredness" of the Bible. 

But there are other superstitious things. There 
are multitudes of men who think that the 
Bible is sacred. No thing is sacred except a 
responsible human being or Divine Being. Only 
by the permission of language we call places 
" sacred," but they have no virtue in them ; nothing 
issues out of them, no atmosphere comes from them. 
We use the language in that way. The Bible ; it is 
a Book that makes a vast amount of sacredness 
among men. It is a Book that, as respects the 
past, is almost as invaluable as the future which it 
depicts. Criticism may carp, men may cut at it and 
cut it up ; the Bible is, after all, a Book that will 
stand as long as men are in sorrow and in despond- 



CONSCIENCE. 83 

<ency, and are in conscious guilt, and are desirous 
for the development of love and peace and hope and 
joy ; it is the fountain of the best qualities that can 
exist in the individual and in human society. The 
only proof that you can make of the Bible is to live 
it ; that will settle it. A very worthy methodical 
man, whose mind is very much like the multiplica- 
tion table, everything divided off into exact figures, 
and accustomed to read his Bible before he goes 
down, as he says, into the world every morning, has 
got halfway down the block when he says: "My 
soul, I forgot to read my chapter ! " and back he 
goes, all a-tremble, to the house, and runs up into 
his chamber and shuts the door, and draws down 
his face and reads a Psalm. Blessed be David, who 
wrote so many short chapters ! The moment he 
has read his chapter he feels better. Now he goes 
down: "I have done my duty." What sort of a 
God must he imagine our God to be ? My children 
love me, and greet me with the morning kiss and 
with the evening farewell ; but suppose, in the 
height and excitement of some enterprise, one of my 
children should forget to kiss me, do you suppose I 
would lay it up all day, would think anything about 
it? Do you suppose God lays up all these little 
things in His disciples and friends? Is He as 
narrow and as mean as our conceptions of Him are ? 
And it is in this way that the Bible is constantly 
used. Men swear by the Bible. It is an idol under 
such circumstances ; stands in the place of God, and 
is an idol. A man sits down accidentally, or he has 
put his child upon the Bible, and the mother says : 
" My dear father, the child is sitting on the Bible ! " 
Well, better foundation he could not sit on. 

The " Sacredness " of Sunday. 

The same is true in regard to Sunday. God for- 
bid that I should ever go back upon that day that 



84 CONSCIENCE. 

has made so large an impression on my early lifev 
At that time, "being "buoyant and mercurial, with a 
fund of animal spirits that could be ill-repressed,. 
I was made to negative everything in me on that 
day, and so the day was a prison to me. Neverthe- 
less, I looked out through the prison doors and I saw 
the stillness — I could almost see it — the brightness 
of the Sunday morning, as it came over the hills in 
dear old Lichfield. The cocks never crew so won- 
drously as they did Sunday morning ; the birds never 
sang so sweetly as on that day. If I could have- 
only wandered out in the garden and in the orchard 
how happy I should have been ! But I had to be shut 
up in the house because it was Sunday — it was th& 
Lord's-day. I had, of course, to do the chores, and 
I think every cow in the barn, the horse and the 
pigs blessed Sunday, for I spent more time over them 
on that day, in order not to go back into the house, 
than on any other day in the week. But I have the 
picture of walking, now well clad, down along the 
shaded streets, hearing the village bell afar, and going 
nearer and nearer to it, and remember the Sabbath 
days as they lay smiling on the hill. I remember 
the afternoons when my aunt, who was as a second 
mother to me, read out of the "Word of God and 
explained as she read. I remember all that belonged 
to it, and I remember some other things, too. I 
remember that I lost my supper a good many times 
because I could not repeat the catechism. I re- 
member, too, that I was all but suffocated because 
I was not allowed to express by a natural expression 
the most innocent and boyish emotion. I recall 
one morning when my brother Charles, the next 
youngest to myself, and I, were lying in a truckle 
bed and waking ; the sun was shining bright out of 
doors, and we were quite oblivious of the period of 
the week. There was an old cotton counterpane 
worn in spots, and we were pulling the cotton wool 



CONSCIENCE. 85 

out of it, making all forms of grotesque things, 
roosters and rabbits and what not, when all at once 
it flashed on my mind — " It is Sunday ! " I really 
had a feeling that God would strike me dead! I 
ducked under the clothes, and he came with me, and 
we lay there gasping for five minutes. When we 
crept out and saw that we were not dead we took 
courage. The austerities of the Sabbath day do not 
belong to it. It is a day of rest, it is a day of love, 
it is a day of the sweetest forms of knowledge im- 
parted by the sweetest lips that live upon the earth, 
and I owe to it so much that it goes hard with me 
even to speak of its asperities, its acerbities, and of 
its abuses. It is the day that belongs especially to 
the poor, to the hard-working man, and I say in 
regard to Sunday, and in regard to the whole Bible, 
that if, poisoned by infidelity, the great working- 
classes of men should throw out the Church and the 
Bible and the ministry they will be like sailors 
among whom the plague has broken out on the ship, 
and they will pitch the doctor overboard and his 
medicine chest after him, and keep the plague. 

The Pragmatical Conscience. 

Now we come to a little milder form of con- 
science — the pragmatical conscience — with a few 
salient points obstinately held without any sense of 
their connection with either each other or any 
general principle. There are some men that have 
a few points that they won't do and a few that they 
will do. You cannot budge them one inch. Reason 
falls upon them like rain on a slate roof. There 
they stand, very conscientious in spots, and very 
loose and careless everywhere else. That is the 
pragmatical conscience. 

The Obstinate Conscience. 

Then a very common conscience is the obstinate 
conscience — that is very common. In proportion to 



86 CONSCIENCE. 

the small amount of moral sensibility, men hold on 
to the little they have got. I have known men to 
be immovable in selfishness and immovable in 
reading the Bible and going to meetings. They had 
a conscience for spots ; not around the circumference 
of their whole experience, only in single things, and 
such men misinterpret religion. 

The Conceited Conscience. 

Then there is the conscience which we may call 
the conceited conscience. There is a strange form 
of conceit — not the milder and less ridiculous, but 
there are natures that are strong — -that whatever 
may be right or wrong in other people, when they 
have once done a thing, that thing is right because 
they did it. They are a law to themselves with a 
vengeance. 

The Despotic Conscience, 

Then there is the despotic conscience, or a man's 
conscience that he lets out at liberty — men that have 
got a conscience for everybody's conduct down the 
whole street — not so particular about themselves, 
but for everybody else. He discerns exactly where 
they are, and where they should be, and he sees 
every variation of it, and he holds the rod of excom- 
munication over the heads of his neighbours. He 
excommunicates them by criticism ; but for himself 
he has not much use for conscience apparently, for 
he keeps very little at home. 

The Home Conscience. 

Then there are men that have consciences for 
home and none for business. There are men that 
at home are genial, and sweet, and gentle, but in 
the street they are sharp ; they do not care for any- 



CONSCIENCE. 87 

body or anything ; they are out for success, and they 
will have it. And there are some pitiful cases even 
in this where men are grasping, greedy, and per- 
severing in overthrowing their rivals, undermining 
their contestants, and get the name of being hard. 
But if you could see how poor they were in their 
childhood, and how poor father and mother were, 
and they determined that before they died they 
would put father and mother, and brother and 
sister, in circumstances of ease and of refinement, 
and for their sake they are giving their whole life. 
It is love, and not avarice, that makes such men. 
Better a better form, but there is something most 
estimable even in that. 

Liberty of Conscience. 

Then there is the politician's conscience ; but that 
must be witten at some later age. I will not 
detain you much longer, except with a few 
words. That which, however, I have it in my 
heart to say is, liberty of conscience is becoming 
a question now of a great deal of importance, and it 
is worth our while to have some fundamental ideas 
on that subject. It has been bought with the price 
of blood, and ripened through an acerb climate of 
human laws and institutions. We have got it, and 
it has become sacred in the eyes of the whole com- 
munity ; and, therefore, it is that when the Mormons 
of America set up their conscience and say, when 
the Government of the United States is determined 
to put down their infamous institution : " We are 
fighting; we are the latest martyrs for liberty of 
conscience " — although we believe in liberty of 
thought and liberty of conscience, we reply it is not 
a question between the Mormons and us as to liberty 
of conscience ; it is a question as to the liberty of 
conduct. Any man may believe what he pleases, and 



88 CONSCIENCE. 

we have no right to interfere with him. Any man 
may have a conscience for any form of belief that 
he chooses, and I shall respect his conscience ; but 
he must keep it to himself. For if his conscience is 
at variance with the settled institutions of society, 
it must not be society that shall go under ; it must 
be that man's conscience, if it breaks out into con- 
duct. There is in India a very religious class ot 
men called Thugs, who say that religion teaches 
fchem that murder is acceptable to the gods. I have 
no objection to their believing that, but I should 
object to their practising it. I have no objection to 
the Mormons believing that polygamy is right and 
Scriptural ; I object to their undertaking to carry 
it out in conduct ; they have no right to do that, 
and we do not violate the rights of conscience when 
we suppress them. "We say: "Think what you 
please, believe what you please, practise what the 
law determines." 

The School as a Trainer of the Conscience. 

Another word I have to say, on the subject of the 
growth of knowledge without the growth of moral 
sense. We are teaching our children in our schools 
a great deal of theology, and, generally speaking, I 
have no word to say against that. There is some 
theology that is good and profitable. But I hold 
that it is the duty of every community to inspire the 
children of the community with rectitude, with 
honour, with veracity, with fidelity, with loyalty ; it 
is the duty of every school to be a trainer of the con- 
science of the young ; that is to say, to lay the foun- 
dation of knowledge in regard to things that are 
right and wrong, and in childhood. The first train- 
ing ground is the household, and the priest of the 
house is the mother, and the impressions pro- 
duced there by her it takes a long life, and a. 



CONSCIENCE. 8 J 

violent one, to wear out ; but when extension of 
life brings the child into the school, it is more 
important that he should know what is right and 
what is wrong as between man and man, than 
that he should know the height of mountains and 
the depth of the sea. And while I would bring to 
bear all knowledge and incitement for the creation 
of intelligence, I would not let intelligence go with- 
out any leading strings, and without any inspiration 
of the important elements of honour, truth, and 
duty. I hold it to be of the last degree of import- 
ance that the sense of conscience should be con- 
tinuous, and that it should be spontaneous. We 
may be in long perplexity as to what is right and 
what is wrong, what is duty and what is to be* 
avoided ; but men should be so trained as, that the- 
moment they know what is right, they instantly — 
— not by reasoning with themselves, not by per- 
suasion, but by automatic necessity — should go to 
the right, and with equal promptness, almost before 
they think of it themselves, should go against the 
wrong. We learn it with our feet, for if a man be 
walking the street and the ground be hummocky,. 
and here and there interspersed with puddles, he 
never stops to think of the difference between liquid 
mud and solid earth, or anything of the kind, but 
his feet pick out the right way all the time. And in 
the great sphere of life, where the paths are sa 
muddy, and there is so much to be avoided as well 
as sought out, the training that we require is not a 
training in the distinctions of theology ; it is a train- 
ing that leads a man to defer instantly to his sense 
of rectitude, and to measurement not by necessity,. 
not by profitableness, not by popularity, not by what 
the community will tolerate, but by what the man 
himself knows to be right, and just, and true, and 
proper. So, then, when we shall come, step by step, 
to the higher forms of instruction in our schools, we 



90 CONSCIENCE. 

shall find that beyond the house stands the school- 
house, beyond the school-house stands the Church, 
and beyond the Church stands life itself; and the 
training, first of the family, then of the school, and 
ihen of the Church, should be on the same line, and 
should prepare men in the great battle of life, first 
to discern what is right and what is wrong, and then 
with whole-hearted enthusiasm to pursue the right 
.and abhor the wrong. 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 



I AM to speak to yon to-night upon the subject 
of Evolution and Eeligion — a difficult subject, 
yet one that lies near to my heart. There has come 
an irruption into the scientific world within half the 
life-time of a man which brings with it more wide- 
spread changes, more profound truths, and more- 
rapid advances in the province of human knowledge 
than has ever belonged to any single age. About 
thirty years ago the " Cosmos" was written, and it 
was an attempt to give a view of all the then au- 
thenticated sciences by Humboldt, and in that there 
was no mention even made of two departments which 
to-day occupy more than one whole half of the 
scientific field — the Persistence of Force and Evolu- 
tion. The rapidity with which these great depart- 
ments have been opened and accepted is one of the 
marks of the advance of the human mind. Any 
equivalent discovery in years gone by would have 
struggled through centuries before its acceptance, 
The human mind was not ripe for it until recently, 
and Evolution is itself a monumental example of the 
doctrine of Evolution. When even the discoveries 
of Newton were made some of the most eminent 
savants of the French nation, heaven save the 
mark! charged him with infidelity and atheism. 
Newton's discoveries, the great law which he dis- 
covered and which revolutionised the beliefs of men, 
for a hundred years found very little acceptance, and 



.32 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 

it was not until about that period that the Uni- 
versity of Oxford itself dared to teach it, and then 
covertly ; it was smuggled in in the form of notes 
to Aristotle's works, which then were taught. But 
to-day the heresy and the dangerous mischief of 
Newton's discoveries, they are all dissipated. And 
there are multitudes of men that look to-day upon 
the theory of Evolution with very much the same 
dread and suspicion. It is thought to be unfavour- 
able to religion, to be not only dangerous heresy, 
but the mother of broods of heresies; and this 
subject falls into line with the experience of every 
age. There is nothing accounted so dangerous as 
the elevation from a lower level of life or belief to 
a higher one, for, as men believe in Morals, Keligion, 
in Philosophy even, they very soon become not simply 
believers, but investors, their whole training runs 
along the line of their belief ; and when some more 
profound view of God and His works is introduced 
they are themselves to be transplanted. Now it is 
not difficult to transplant a young tree, but you 
cannot transplant an old one without cutting the 
roots and cutting down the top very much ; and men 
do not like it ; and so it is almost always the case 
that the holders of opinions that are to be taken 
out of the way by the new-coming beliefs become 
opponents, I will not say from coarse and sordid 
motives, but from that infirmity of men by which 
official men, teachers, men advanced in life, who 
have had their whole reputation earned upon other 
bases, from very natural causes they become sus- 
pectors of the new truth, and believe that it will 
introduce waste and ruin. 

The General Acceptance of Evolution. 

Now it is no part of my purpose to-night — even if I 
could do it, and I cannot — to authenticate Evolution, 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 93 

or even to give a large view of its evidences. I can 
simply say this, that 95 per cent, of physicists 
in Europe and America have given in their adhesion 
substantially to the doctrine of Evolution. It is a 
province as yet not thoroughly explored and settled 
in all its outlines or details, but in some sort it is 
said almost proverbially now, everybody is an Evolu- 
tionist in some shape. Yes ; and that shows itself 
the marked development that has taken place 
within the past twenty years ; everybody is an 
Evolutionist, with an exception and an objection to 
save themselves. Nevertheless, it is beginning to be 
taught in academies, in schools ; it is beginning to 
have currency in newspapers ; it is even, most dan- 
gerous of all, beginning to be preached from pulpits ; 
and what the outcome of such an intrusion will be, 
which, although it is vitalising every department of 
society, will unquestionably make mischief with 
many theories and philosophies outside of the 
Church and of religion, I leave you to judge, for you 
can do it as well as I. It will not be twenty years 
before everybody will say : " Of course Evolution ; 
I always believed in Evolution ! " 

What is Evolution? 

"Well, what is it ? I cannot define it. There is a 
definition of it which, to men trained in scientific 
thought, is satisfactory ; but to those that do not 
know what it is, I think the definition would need 
•defining. Mr. Spencer, one of the lights of this 
age, defines Evolution as "A change from an 
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, 
coherent heterogeneity through continuous dif- 
ferentiations and integrations." If you do not 
understand that, I am sorry for you. Well, let us 
give a little more popular description rather than a 
scientific definition, and, in general, allow me to say 



94 EVOLUTION AND EELIG-ION. 

that I regard Evolution as being the discovery of 
the Divine method in creation. Aforetime we have 
supposed that God created with instant aneity, and 
there are sublime passages that men remember, and 
there are in poetry and dramatic representation 
many statements that border upon that ; but there 
is no evidence whatsoever that God created any part 
of the organic world by an instantaneous in-thrusting 
of Divine power. On the other hand, the method 
of God in this matter has been Gradualism, an 
unfolding from lower to higher steadily carried on, 
and Evolution undertakes to show, with some 
degree of clarity, what are the steps of unfolding 
which, beginning far back, have not ceased yet to 
operate in this physical world. It is, in short, if I 
may say so, the belief of men that once this world 
was simply ether, that under great material laws, 
perhaps not yet well understood, it collected itself 
and assumed some forms flocculent, went into 
circulation, passed into its igneous state, and into 
that condition in which the sun now is ; gradually 
radiated its heat, came to a more solid condition, and 
then, partly by water, partly by ice, partly by 
grinding elements, partly by chemical changes, there 
began to be a soil. Thus far, the inorganic creation ; 
but then, upon this soil, slowly, coarsely, and very 
low down, began the vegetable creation. After that 
came in the animal, and the stages as they are 
supposed now to be determined, were, in the first 
place, the lower forms of invertebrate life, and after 
that the vertebrate, the more highly organised. 
Then, through countless ages, they ascended from 
the fish to the reptilian, from the reptilian to the 
marsupial, from that to the bird, from that to the 
quadrumanal, and from that to man. Now, I 
apprehend that nobody would have the slightest 
objection to a belief that the world has been 
created by these gradual unfolding stages, and under 



EVOLUTION AND KELIGION. 95 

the general influence of material laws, if it did not 
touch the question of man. There is a great 
objection on the part of men to their ancestry. I do 
not feel it myself. If, as many think, but not all, 
that man has his antecedent ancestor in some one 
of the monkey family, I do not wonder that men 
stop looking up their pedigree. And yet why ? I 
had as lief come from a monkey as from anything 
else — if I had come far enough along. But one thing- 
is certain : men have outlived that early stage ; 
they are not monkeys now — mostly ; they are 
rational beings, moral, spiritual beings to-day. 
What they were and what their origin was may be 
a matter of some importance in biology ; but it seems 
to me that it need not inspire any such disgust as 
that man should turn away from the fact that the 
analogy of creation is that everything has ascended 
from some foregoing form, and that those best 
adapted to their surroundings are the ones that 
survived while others perished, or continued upon a 
low level without any further ascension. To believe 
this is to upset not only a good deal of man's 
impressions and romantic feeling, but it goes 
against many theories in theology, many dogmas ; 
it undermines every doctrine ; and men, while they 
might be willing to accept it as fact in physics, do 
not like to accept it, with its consequences, in 
theology. 

Evolution an Aid to Christianity. 

Now, I hold that Evolution, so far from being in 
antagonism with true religion, will develop it with 
more power than any other presentation of science 
that ever has occurred in this world. The day will 
come when men will render thanks for that which 
now they deprecate. I hold that Christianity itself, 
so far from being clouded, set aside, or in any way 
crippled, will be itself illustrated, and will be helped 

s 



"96 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 

in its acceptance and use by men by a rational view 
of the doctrine of Evolution ; and it is my purpose 
to-night not to force the belief of Evolution upon 
you, but to stand between you and your just thought 
and feeling, and to show you, if I can, that a mode- 
rate and just view of Evolution will be of no dis- 
advantage to Christianity, and of very much advan- 
tage to all its surrounding institutions and offspring. 

What is Christianity ? 

But, now, what is Christianity? What is the 
religion of Christ? in other words. Well, it seems 
to me that the religion of Christ stands distinguished 
from the religion of His countrymen not so much in 
the ends sought as in the means by which they were 
sought. Eight through the whole Old Testament, 
through its valleys and its hills, obscurities or reve- 
lations, right through that whole wonderful history 
of that wonderful people, there was one central aim 
— righteousness. And what is righteousuess ? Man- 
hood. The Old Testament undertook to develop 
men to their full limit, so as that they should come 
into the possession and exercise of all the elements 
of manhood. That was their search; how imper- 
fectly they succeeded is revealed in the teaching of 
Our Lord in the New Testament. The New Testa- 
ment takes up where the Old Testament drops 
this ideal, and it is the endeavour of Christianity to 
give to men a development such as shall bring them 
up to all their capacity, and fill out the ideal of God 
in men. It is not theology, though it gave birth to 
it ; it is not churchism, though it has since bred 
churches ; it is not the science of ethics in a general 
way — it is the attempt of Christian religion to de- 
velop men, and to bring them up to the highest 
unfolding of their spiritual nature, their social 
nature, as well as their physical nature. Wlieix 



EVOLUTION AND EELIOION. 97 

Christ came He began his preaching thus : " Eepent, 
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," the new 
dispensation. He at once declared that men were 
all of them sinful, in a lower and unfolded condition, 
and the first declaration was: "Change; let go 
the old and under, take hold of the new and 
higher." It was addressed directly to men. "Ee- 
pent "was the watchword that opened His ministry. 
And another characteristic note of Christ's teaching 
was this — namely, that men not only were to repent 
and let go past things, but that there was a trans- 
formation possible in them: "Be converted" — 
lifted up into a new and higher kingdom. He 
taught not only that men might be converted, but 
He went to the root of all reformation from His day 
to this, and from this onward to the end. He began 
with the individual man. He did not undertake to 
convert communities. He did not undertake to 
-convert philosophies. He says to the individual 
man: "Be converted; rise higher into the spirit- 
life." He set the man's new life over against the 
old physical life. Men now are everywhere reor- 
ganising society, and they are attempting, in various 
experimental ways, to improve the conditions of 
man. You never will change the conditions of the 
great masses of men in society in any other way 
than that of the Saviour's — namely, change the in- 
dividual, and you will change the mass. Men are 
talking about equality, and about the reorganisation 
of society, so that every man shall receive his own. 
Preposterous ! By changing the individual society 
gradually changes itself. Christ also taught the 
doctrine of the Divine immanence and intersphering, 
that God was with Him, in Him, and that He was 
near to men, and that He intermixed, as it were, 
His life and being with our lower life ; and that it 
was by the inspiration of the Divine life that men 
•were able to rise above animalism, and to come into 



98 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 

relations with the invisible, with the spiritual, and 
with the eternal. Now, the character that men 
were to bear is described abundantly and often, not 
perhaps in the Gospels themselves so much as in the 
understanding that the Apostles accepted of it. The 
" fruit of the Spirit," say they, is — what ? Ortho- 
doxy ? Oh, no ! Eight believing ? Oh, no ! " The 
fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
gentleness, meekness, goodness, faith, self-govern- 
ment." There was the style of character that 
Christ taught. 

Where is the Antagonism ? 

Now, I have to ask you if this be really the inward 
Gospel which Christ brought into the world — God 
revealed to men and in men an influence that should 
change men, and lift them above their animal 
potency into a spiritual sovereignty, and if this was 
the style of character that they were to develop in 
consequence of it, is there anything in Evolution that 
is antagonistic to this view — is there anything ins 
any philosophy that is antagonistic ? Are not men 
primary animals ? Are they not steadily, by the force 
of civilisation, but still more by the force of a true 
religion, lifted up above animalism into a spiritual 
condition ? And, still unfolding, is not this the cha- 
racter that all men — I care not who they are, nor 
what their philosophy is — will recognise as the true 
character for an ideal man, the man that lives by his 
animal economy in regard to material things, but. 
over and above that he lives in the larger realm of 
thought, and in the larger realm of disposition and 
character, and in a larger commerce not only with 
the things revealed by the eye and the ear, but the 
things revealed, also, by the imagination, and by the 
aspirations of mankind ? Is there anything, then, 
in Christianity, stated in its simple form, that Evolu- 
tion or science in any shape has any objection to? 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 99 

None. But there has grown up round about this 
simple element in the Gospel — namely, a great move- 
ment of the spheres, as it were, by which man was 
being exalted above the animal and into the spiritual 
conditions of life — there have grown up, and not 
without reasonable explanations, a great many 
philosophies, theologies, institutions, and they have 
become so mixed that most men have lost sight of 
the fact that religion is a life, has in it a philosophy 
of life, and that most men have not yet distinguished 
between creeds and the evangelism of Christ. They 
have, in some sense in their mind and imagination, 
all that which has subsequently been clustering 
round about, indirectly springing from the spread 
of Christianity — Churches, with all kinds of ordi- 
nances and beliefs, discordant often ; but neverthe- 
less men call everything that belongs to the Church 
" Religion." Now, there is very much that is 
secondary that belongs, in some sense, to the Church 
and to active religion that is not religion itself, but 
merely accessory to it, and in regard to many of 
those things I do not hesitate to say that I believe 
the progress of Evolution will reduce them from 
their present importance, and bring them to the 
place where they will be of some value, though 
never of supreme importance. 

Evolution and the 'Personality of God. 

And now, with this general statement, allow me 
to proceed still more specifically with reference to 
the general effect of Evolution, and to defend from 
the sceptical men that have held it some of the 
great primary beliefs of men. And in the first 
place there is no possibility, it seems to me, of 
Evolution or any of the group of truths scientific 
that now surround it, are born out of it or are 
accompanying it — there is nothing in the flow 



100 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 

and tendency of science to destroy upon a rational 
mind the belief in the existence of a personal 
God, to say nothing of the impossibility of con- 
ceiving any other, to add to our view that 
Divine personality must include in it much that does 
not belong to human personality, that it has in it 
that which in us represents thought-power, will- 
power, individual power, emotive power. "What all 
these inhere in the Divine nature ! There is nothing- 
in science that can disprove it, or even throw a 
doubt upon it. You are to bear in mind that the 
Scriptures never affirm that the existence of God 
and His Divine nature is provable by any of those 
methods of proof which we apply to other things. 
To begin with, God does not address Himself to 
any of our senses ; we neither see Him, nor hear 
Him, nor in anyway can we approach or touch Him 
with conscious personality. That has been the teach- 
ing of the Bible from the earliest beginning ; the Great 
God has hid Himself in eternal silences to the men 
of old ; and throughout the New Testament it is the 
declaration of Christ, and of the Apostles, that the only 
evidence that there is of the existence of God lies in 
moral intuition. It is not a new defensory doctrine 
that we proclaim, it is the doctrine and the interior 
thought of Christianity, and its predecessor — name- 
ly, that God was very much larger than man and 
human nature, and there was in Him so much more 
than that, that could it be discerned even, it would be 
impossible to establish by the proof which we can 
bring to bear in regard to organised and physical 
human beings. There can be no such demonstra- 
tion of the existence of God. 

Knowledge by Intuition. 

What then is moral intuition? We find it very 
clearly foreshadowed in Scripture : — "Blessed are 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 101 

the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And John 
in his epistle speaks of God as being Love, and they 
that love shall know Him, and they that do not love 
shall not. He makes that very strong, and repeti- 
tionally declared, and, I suppose, that men of large 
nature, that men attuned to the fulness and genius 
of love, are the men that have coming to them 
through the vast spaces of life, intimations of the 
reality of God's existence, that are stronger evi- 
dence to them than any reasoning or any pos- 
sible statement that can be made. In regard 
to all the finer processes of the human mind, ii 
is by intuition that you come to the highest ele- 
ments ; as in music it is intuition, in arts it is 
intuition; yea, in the dealings of men with each 
other it is intuition ; in others words it is a sudden 
sense of the truth projected from the mind, when 
it is fine, strong, and luminous, that is, in a state of 
exaltation. There are multitudes of things in which 
men believe and glory, about which the proof abso- 
lutely, so far as ordinary logic or proof is concerned, 
is wanting ; nevertheless, they are among the things 
that are most absolutely believed. I believe in mul- 
titudes of things that I cannot demonstrate, and yet 
I should be ashamed to be supposed wanting in 
belief in them, and the highest form of intui- 
tion is the intuition by which we see God. Now 
the element through which He can make Him- 
self known to us is not the element of ratiocina- 
tion, it is not the element that carries with it 
physical properties or demonstrations, it is the 
evidence that only comes to the highest states and 
the finest qualities that belong to the spiritual man- 
hood of men ; and when men have lived according 
to the great doctrine of love, in purity, in sympathy,. 
in generosity, in reasonable self-denial, when they 
are men that have lived in that atmosphere, there 
comes to them in bright and blessed moments such 



102 EVOLUTION a:;d eeligion 

a consciousness of the presence of God, that they 
cannot doubt that He is near to them. What He 
is, how much He is, where He is, a thousand things 
they cannot determine, hut that there is this 
power which men call God they do know, just 
as a man knows it is summer by the way he 
feels. Do I not know fragrance? It has not 
been distilled, it is not visible to me, it is a con- 
sciousness that is bred in me with regard to physical 
things — which is an illustration rather than an 
analogy. And so there are many of the noblest 
inspirations of man, self-devotion, patriotism, and 
the capacity to understand them both, and to wor- 
ship them both among men. But all of these turn 
on that facility of the mind to know from the fol- 
lowing out of the qualities that are in themselves, 
higher forms of emotion, life, and character. 

The Authority of Testimony. 

So, then, if men may say, " This may be an evi- 
dence to the man himself, but it is no evidence to 
those who stand round him," I reply, " Yes, it is ; 
it ought to be." No man can possibly understand 
everything, and we are obliged to depend upon each 
other's testimony for 19-20ths of all that we know. 
It is so in science, eminently ; nobody is a universal 
scientist; everybody borrows the testimony of some 
•one else. If there dwells in any community a man 
that is God-like, and that through long experience 
and trial proves himself to be much lifted above the 
lower forms of passion, lifted into the serene realm 
of love, lifted into rapture in those conditions, and, 
if living worthily of such a declaration, he returns 
again, as it were, to a lower experience, and says, 
"I know, I know, I know," men have a right to 
believe him in those higher realms as they would 
believe him in lower realms of life. Do not you 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 103 

believe in travellers' story ? Do not you believe in 
scientific statements? Do not you believe in the 
great burden of knowledge, which has blessed the 
world, upon the testimony of men competent, that 
would not lie, that are assured in their statements 
hy the experience of men round about them — do 
not you accept their beliefs as your belief? And 
when a man, living a God-like life, and lifted 
into higher realms of experience, says, " I have had 
borne in on me, as no proof or demonstration ever 
did anything else — I have had borne in upon my 
mind, There is a God, there is a God ! " — I hold 
that you have a perfect right to accept his intuition 
as if it were your own, and no science can prove 
that there is no God. Some German men have 
said, " There is no need of one." They may not 
see any need of one. The world has seen the need 
of one, and whether there be or not, the dictum 
that it is false philosophy to assign two causes for 
any phenomenon when one will do, will, perhaps, 
work against the evidence of God's interference 
with matter; but what with regard to that great 
realm of experience within the soul? It would not 
touch that, and that constitutes the largest part of 
every noble life. It is the thing that is within ; it 
is the accumulated moral testimonies and intuition 
that are the riches and treasure of the soul, and you 
cannot get rid of it by saying there is no scientific 
evidence that such things are valid. There is no 
evidence against the existence of God. 



Q 



Evolution and "Design" 

But it is said that Evolution has shown one thing 
very clearly > jaamely, that the old doctrines of the 
designs of God in the creation of this world are no 
longer tenable. May be not ; perhaps not. It used 
to be thought : " Why, here is a flower growing 



104 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 

right up under the edge of a glacier. "What a beau- 
tiful design of God to create a flower that should be 
adapted precisely to this situation ! " Whereas 
conies the Evolutionist and says : " Everything that 
was not adapted to it died out, and this is the only 
thing left, because it is adapted to its situation and 
circumstances." No design in it, no evidence ! and 
so all through the whole round, things that live 
live because they are adapted to their surround- 
ings or " environment," as it is called, and they 
are thought to be evidence of design. I think they 
are, too, but not they alone. I hold that the evi- 
dence of design is stronger from the standpoint of 
Evolution than it was from the standpoint of special 
creation. It is not simply an evidence of design by 
the location of this and that and the other thing, 
by the combinations between nature and function 
and condition. Here is a vast system running- 
through the ages, a system that has in general one 
single tendency, namely : the things that are poor 
go under, and the things that are better survive, and 
the better yet still overtop them and go on, and this 
has been going on through ages and running through 
vast spheres of dispensation, and all of them work- 
ing together and working harmoniously. Is there 
no evidence of design with regard to this vast 
system and it's tendencies ? Here is a man 
standing in a factory, and by great labour he 
makes a gunstock, and by-and-by a man invents 
a lathe which turns out gunstocks, so that while 
the other man can make one a day, this can 
make 500 a day. I should like to know whether 
the evidence of skill and design in the man that 
could make one is not greater in the man that can 
make a machine that can make 500. There is a 
carpet-loom, a great-power loom, and when you 
stand before it you almost think the thing ought to 
vote, it looks so intelligent. Now, if you were to 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 105 

see an Oriental woman squatting upon the ground 
and making exquisite rugs, putting in bits here and 
there, thrusting in the shuttle once in a while and 
fixing it, by-and-by comes out in glowing colours- 
a beautiful carpet, you say, " What a magnificent 
design ! of course somebody did it." Now suppose 
a man can make a machine that can do all this, is 
not that man a designer much greater than were 
these women who were making these individual 
rugs ? The man that can create the greater design 
that is involved in these inferior executions is a, 
greater man than the one that can merely do the 
inferior things. And the whole development of the 
method of God in the whole world, when it comes 
to be looked at from the higher point of view, is 
itself sublime evidence of design in the creation 
and in the continuance of this globe. 

Evolution and Prayer. 

Well, the doctrine of Evolution or the scientific 
doctrines that go with it is said to destroy Christian 
prayer. No, it does not. It leaves it just where it 
was. " Well," says man, " do you suppose that God 
changes the whole economy of this world in answer 
to a man's prayer?" I do not, myself; do you? 
People say the " prayer of faith " would indicate 
that it does. The "prayer of faith" is a very 
curious thing. In regard to medicine it seems to- 
affect everything ; people are cured of this, that, and 
the other thing on the " prayer of faith," but it stops- 
short at surgery. When a man's leg is shot off, 
if the " prayer of faith " could make another 
grow I should be very much inclined to believe 
in the doctrine ; but where it is easy to have 
relation to the nervous constitutions of the men 
and the "prayer of faith" acts upon these nerv 
centres, I do not understand at all why natuul 
causes should not produce many of the things that 



106 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 

men call an answer directly to prayer. But I re- 
pudiate this whole view of prayer; it is vulgar, 
•simply vulgar ! Why, suppose that you think of 
prayer, as many people do, as an omnivorous 
begging: men going to God every day, ''Give me 
■■something! give me something! give me some- 
thing ! give me something ! ' ' You find them at the 
corner of the street crying and whining and holding 
out their hat with a pernicious blandness, and you 
will find them in churches doing just the same 
thing to God, all the while praying for this and 
praying for that, and giving thanks for this and 
that. Now, I do not object to a man's being grate- 
ful in a general way for the providence that sup- 
plies his wants ; but I say that this is the merest 
outskirt, that it bears about as much relation to 
prayer as a man's body does to his soul and to his 
inward excellences. "Well, suppose I should behold, 
or some one at least should behold, in a wealthy 
heiress his very ideal of companionship, and, making 
advances, finds gradual recipience, and little by 
little he comes to look upon her as angels are looked 
upon — woe is that man that does not see an angel 
•once in his life, however soon its flight may be 
taken — in the freshness and exhilaration of a true 
love he feels that the very atmosphere is blessed ; 
and the play of thought and emotion in her, it was 
as if he heard the very choirs of heaven. He stays 
to look and listen, and then he goes out and 
meets one of his companions, who says to him, 
"I say, Jack, have you been to see her to-day ? " 
"I have." "Did she give you anything?" " No." 
Well, suppose the man should say to him, "Is not 
she rich? " "Of course she is rich." " And you 
thinks she likes you, too, and you did not ask her for 
anything ! Td have asked her ; I'd have got some- 
thing worth having if I had been in your place." 
No, he would not ; he could not have got in his 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 107 

place ; he would have been spurned and rejected by 
the high-minded and noble woman. The intercourse 
of life is but the faintest emblem of what prayer 
means, the lifting of ourselves into the conscious 
presence of the Ideal and the Eternal, and the 
issuing of our highest and best thought, love, praise, 
longing, and adoration. These things are the higher 
conception of prayer, not a species of begging — 
" Give me something, give me something." "We 
are not forbidden to put ourselves in prayer under 
the recognition of the general providence of God by 
which we are supported—" Give us this day our 
daily bread ; " but that is only one sentence in the 
whole prayer ; it is merely a recognition of our re- 
lations to God. The prayer that was uttered by 
Jesus, the prayer that is recorded anywhere by 
His apostles, is of a higher nature than that. I know 
that there has been a controversy upon this subject,, 
and I think it to be a very contemptible contro- 
versy ; it has been proposed that we should start twa 
hospitals, one of which may be a prayer-answering- 
hospital, and the other should be a medical one 
according to the ordinary application of natural 
laws, as if that had anything to do with the real 
question. Can the soul mingle its thought and. 
feeling with the Divine Soul? The animal man 
cannot answer that, the spiritual man can ; and the 
testimony of men among themselves, the higher 
men in their higher moments and with their 
higher faculties, is that prayer is possible ; the inter- 
change of our feeling and life with the Divine life^ 
inter sphering : this is not only profitable, but 
beyond all other experience ennobling. Science 
does not destroy prayer. 

Evolution and Bin. 

Now I come a little nearer to a theological ground 
round about which there has been much controversy. 



108 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 

Science does not destroy the doctrine of human sin- 
fulness ; it explains it, it defines it, it throws a 
clearer light upon it. The old doctrine of sin, which 
it seems to me no man of moral feeling could allow 
himself to stand on for an hour or a moment, was 
that the human race born of their progenitors fell 
with them, and that the curse of God rested upon 
the whole human posterity, and that therefore all 
men by reason of their connection with Adam are 
born without original righteousness, without true 
holiness, and without communion with God. They 
were born without righteousness and holiness and 
communion with God, and they were born without 
everything else too ; they were born with feet that 
could not walk, and with hands that could not 
handle, and with eyes that could not see, and with 
ears that could not hear ; they were born without 
arithmetic, without grammar, they were born with- 
out anything but potential power, with the capacity 
to come to these things by the process of unfolding, 
and when men say the whole human family is born 
without righteousness, of course it is ; that is a thing 
that belongs to development and to conscious voli- 
tion later on. Now what is sin ? how would it be 
denned from the standpoint of sense if you accept 
the doctrine of Evolution, that if man was not 
actually developed from the animal, he was so near 
to him that he was substantially an animal in his 
savage state ? But admit for the moment that man 
was primarily an animal, born and developed from 
his congeners into a higher state ; that there was super- 
induced upon him a moral element, a spiritual 
element, a rational element. The animal man was 
first in order, and too often in strength, in the primi- 
tive day, in the early day of every man. And sin 
lies in the conflict between the upper and the under 
man. If you want to see the doctrine stated in its 
•most cogent form, read the 7th chapter of Romans, 



EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 109 

where the conflict is not between a man before he 
is converted, and after he is converted, but between 
the man animal and the man moral and spiritual ; 
where he thinks the highest things, and would fain 
do the highest things, but is pulled down and dragged 
under perpetually by the forces of his animal body. 
Sin is the remainder, as it were, of the conflict 
between man moral and spiritual and man animal 
and so far degraded. And this gives not simply a 
rational explanation that every man's reason can 
perceive ; but it takes away the idea from the 
administration of God that men were cursed in their 
birth without any fault of their own, and that they 
were being punished throughout all ages in this 
world on account of a sin that they never committed. 
They have had no part nor lot in their great-fore- 
father's temptation and fall, but they have had to 
have their dividend in that everlasting, increasing 
and ever-rolling damnation that came to them in 
consequence of it. Men do not believe it, and I 
honour them for it. And see what a difference it 
would make in the preacher, for now when he goes 
on preaching about the fall of Adam, and posterity- 
all of them falling with him, and that sin was the 
result of that great fall, men say, " Has not he 
finished his sermon ? he has been preaching now 
twenty-five minutes." You do not believe it ! But 
if a man stands before his congregation and says to 
them, " This is sin, the conflict between your lower 
nature and your higher, and you know what it is ; you 
know what you ought to do, and you know that the 
reason you do not do it is the animal temptations 
and seductions and down-falling." Men hang 
their heads and say, "It is so, it is so;" and 
you will have an audience with you, and they 
will believe you, whereas now you have an audience 
that do not believe you. And the way out of it 
becomes rational. A man is to be born again ; that 



110 EVOLUTION AND BELIGION. 

is, his life is to pass in its strength from its under 
nature into its higher nature ; that is a potency given 
to a man by which he can change the point and 
emphasis in his own structure ; and whereas to-day 
he is influenced mainly by considerations of success 
and by his physical relations to men in the tempta- 
tions that flow out of his past, it is possible for him 
to pass into that realm in which he shall be con- 
trolled by reason, by sense of morality, and above 
all, by the aspirations of his soul for purity, for 
obedience, for worship, for love, which is the mother 
of them all. And, therefore, when you preach to a 
congregation "You are sinners," you do not need 
any proof ; the things that you would you do not, 
and the things that you would not that you do ; you 
go out in the morning, purposing to be beneficent 
and rational and reasonable, and come back every 
night, saying, "I lost my temper, and with my 
temper I lost my good sense ; " you go out in the 
morning, saying, " 1 will be generous," and you come 
back at night, saying, "I have been selfish and 
mean " : every night of a man's conscious experi- 
ence sits in judgment on the man's morning. 
Everyman knows what the reality of that truth is — 
the everlasting interplay between the under man 
and upper man, and every man lives, therefore, in 
the experience of the 7th chapter of Komans. And 
such a doctrine as this will not only convince men 7 
but will guide them into a higher life and nobler 
purpose, better than the old historic theology of the 
mediseval ages, the scholastic theology. 

Evolution and " Bevivals." 

Then it may be said that these rationalised doc- 
trines will stand in the way of that overflow of 
zeal and active effort which we denominate revivals 
of religion. It may, but it .does not need to do so. 



EVOLUTION AND KELIGION. Ill 

What is a revival of religion ? It is simply a pheno- 
menon in common with a multitude of others in 
variety, by which the feelings of men gather strength 
by the collected and connected feelings in the same 
direction of the multitudes in society. It is easy 
to do business when business rushes and every- 
body is in the market ; it is easy to be patriotic 
when the whole community is roused to that one 
current of thought. Fashion becomes very catching 
indeed when everybody is bent upon this superlative 
quality ; the run of the mind is helped by the run 
of other minds in the same direction. Now when 
revivals of religion are "got up," as it is said, 
it is simply a natural' bringing .together of men, 
and by teaching and singing, bringing their thoughts 
into the same channel until one with another they 
coalesce, and the fire is kindled and it flows on, and 
the man finds himself segregated from his old com- 
panions and habits, and he finds it is easier to turn 
his thoughts to religion and the purposes of re- 
formation than it would be if he stood alone. It 
is hard to make one brand burn itself out, but put 
plenty together and you kindle a fire that consumes 
them all. There is no reason, therefore, why there 
should not be these methods in religion which we 
denominate " revivals," applying to the highest things 
of life that which we are accustomed to apply to all 
the fundamental and lower developments of human 
society. 

Evolution and the Church. 

Still, it may be said that if this is to prevail it is 
going to change all church life and everything of 
that kind. Gradually it will change it, but not to 
abolish it, but to raise it to a higher level than that 
at which it exists now. There is nothing in this 
world that men need so much as instruction as to 
the development of their higher nature and the 



112 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 

constant incitement of their higher nature, and 
there are no institutions provided by society for 
these ends. Go to the newspapers : they have incal- 
culable benefits, but of a lower range, and they do 
not tend to make men higher and nobler in their 
aspirations. The common schools, the universities, 
the whole sphere of ordinary educatioc, science 
itself has no direct relation to the education of men 
in their higher life. The Church is the only school 
and the only academy that exists where the main 
business is to educate men's understandings so that 
duty and worship shall be perpetually developed and 
continuously maintained. Churches are no doubt 
susceptible of much improvement, but the thing 
itself is a universal necessity, and neither science 
nor anything else will ever destroy them. Well, I 
hold with regard to the churches that any church 
that undertakes to raise the standard of spiritual 
and moral life among men is a Christian church, I 
hold that anything in this world that is found 
with various application and continuance to sub- 
serve the vital interests of humanity, that is Divine 
whatever it may be. We do not need to trace it 
back to the Apostles to give it sanctity ; whatever 
thing has been shown to be beneficial to mankind is 
Divine — it would not be beneficial without it. I 
believe in the apostolicity of churches, I believe in 
the descent from the Apostles, I believe that that 
man that is the most humble, the most self-sacrific- 
ing, the loveliest man before God and with the 
deepest love, he is apostolic. There is no descent 
from the Apostles except in the apostolic life. 

The Sects of the Church. 

I do not suppose that science and Evolution among 
them will ever destroy even the sects of religion. I 
do not know why they should. I do not know 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 113 

what you would gain by it. What the sects 
need is common decency, that is all. You could 
not get the whole of London into one church : 
physical necessity would oblige you to divide up into 
bodies. You never can get men to see any physical 
or intellectual thing just in the same way; some 
men are short-sighted, some men are long-sighted, 
they cannot see just alike. A man's belief is largely 
determined by the constitution of the emotion 
that lies behind his brain and feeling. You can 
make men pretend that they believe the same creed, 
but they do not believe the same creed ; it is a simple 
impossibility. They may come near enough for cohe- 
sion and for general purposes, but it is not probable 
that there are any two men in this whole audience 
that think alike on any one point. If you could 
take a daguerreotype of the inside of the brain instead 
of the outside of the face, men would be as different 
inside as they are outside in that matter. Now, 
there is no earthly reason why sects — that is to say, 
divisions of Christians, by elective affinity — should 
not all come together and live in peace ; men that 
live through the imagination in one group, men that 
live through ratiocinative process in another group, 
men that live by veneration, and men that live by 
hope ; and these may very naturally subdivide, and if 
they let each other alone they may live in peace. 
Only introduce that economy which exists in house- 
keeping.. Take the families on each side of a street, 
and there is not any one of them that is like any 
other one in their mode of housekeeping ; they do 
not get up at the same hour, nor go to sleep at the 
same hour ; they do not breakfast at the same hour, 
nor have the same things on the table ; and they do 
not think it comely for the one to peer into the 
window, or go round to the kitchen and see how the 
other is living; there is a certain letting alone 
which is indispensable to good neighbourhood, and 



114 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 

if that economy were only introduced among 
churches — let other people alone — it would be better. 
Nor do I see that there need be any quarrel about 
ordinances either. Why, if the Quaker wants to 
discern spiritually what other men want sensuously, 
let him have his ordinance inside while you have 
yours outside. Some men are divided from each 
other on the question of the Sabbath-day ; " let 
every man be convinced in his own mind," saith 
Paul, and in this very case, too. Do not undertake 
to make your conscience the despot of other people's 
liberty. One man thinks that it is adequate to 
baptize by sprinkling, another man wants quantity. 
There is water enough and to spare in the world — 
let him have it. Why need you dispute about it ? 
Let every man have his own. Ay, but it is the 
attempt to impose your conscience on other 
people — that is where the trouble comes in. The 
real vice of sects is self-conceit ; they think that 
God has whispered certain secrets to them that 
nobody else knows, that they are sent out to be the 
teachers and witnesses of those great truths, and 
that it is their duty to make these things not only 
manifest, but to separate men from their fellows. 
Now, I hold that in the infancy of the human race 
separating men from their fellows was indispens- 
able, as in childhood it is indispensable to separate 
children from their bad companions round about ; 
but one of the tokens of manhood is that a man 
does not separate himself from his kind ; he is 
strong enough to go into companionship. And the 
genius of Christianity is to bring men together, and 
any system of doctrine, any system of worship, any 
system of ordinance, any procedure whatever that 
undertakes to build moral walls of partition between 
men that are really living after the mind of Christ, 
substantially it, by just so much, variates the evi- 
dence of the Christianity of that Church, for Chris- 



EVOLUTION AND EELIGION. 115 

tianity brings men together. " Stay at home," said 
the Old Testament to the Jews. "Go ye forth and 
preach the Gospel to every nation," said the New 
Testament. The law of seclusion and separation is 
the law of childhood, and it is not law of manhood 
in Christ. 

Evolution and Immortality. 

Then there is beyorjd that an element in Evolu- 
tion which endears it to me and to every man ; I 
think it throws bright gleams on the question of 
immortality. I see that the unfolding series in this 
world are all the time from lower to higher, that the 
ideal is not reached at any point, that the leaf works 
toward the bud, and the bud toward the blossom, and 
the blossom toward the tree, and that in the whole 
experience of human nature, and in the whole 
economy of the providence of God in regard to the 
physical world, everything is on a march upward 
and onward. And one thing is very certain, 
that neither in the individual nor in the col- 
lective mass has the intimation of God in the 
human consciouscess verified and fulfilled itself. 
The imperfection shows that we are not much 
further than the bud ; somewhere we have a 
right to a prescience of the blossom, and the last 
we can see of men and of the horizon is when 
their faces are turned as if they were bound for the 
New Jerusalem, upward and onward. I think there 
is no other point of doctrine that is so vital to the 
heart of mankind as this — we shall live again ; we 
shall live a better and a higher and a nobler life. 
Paul says : " If in this life only we have hope, we 
are, of all men, most miserable ; " and ten thousand 
weary spirits in every community are saying : " Oh, 
this life has been a stormy one to me ; full of 
disappointments, full of pains and sorrows and 
shames and poverty and suffering, and now comes 



116 EVOLUTION AND EELIOION. 

this vagabond philosophy, and dashes out of my 
hand the consolation of believing that I am to live 
again." And it is the cry of the soul: " Lord, let 
me live again ! " The accumulated experience of 
this life ought to have a sphere in which it can 
develop itself and prove itself. Now, I have this 
feeling — I thank God that the belief in a future and 
in an immortal state is in the world ; I thank God 
that it is the interest of every man to keep it in the 
world ; I thank God that there is no power of proof 
in science that we shall not live. Science may say : 
" You cannot demonstrate it ; " but I believe it ; 
then it is my joy. Can you go to the body of the 
companion of your love, the lamp of your life, and 
bid it farewell at the grave ? One of the most extra- 
ordinary passages in the Gospels is that where the 
disciples John and Peter ran to the grave of Jesus 
and saw the angels sitting, and they said to them : 
"I know whom ye seek; He is not here; He is 
risen." But what a woe if one bore mother or 
father, wife or child to the open grave, and there 
was no angel in it ; if you said farewell for ever as 
the body was let down to its kindred earth. It is 
the hope of a joyful meeting by-and-by that sustains 
grief and bereavement in these bitter losses in life. 
There be men that have but the one hope. There 
be poor men, men coming out of the mine, men in 
the stithy, men, strong, great, poor, and proud ; and 
they have a little child ; the mother has died from 
it, and that little child is the star of their life, and 
every day they bear hardship and privation for the 
child's sake. It is the first little face that twinkles 
through the shrubbery as the father comes home at 
night o'er spent, and the child's loving embrace is his 
renewed life, and she is the last one that waits and 
calls out sweeter than a bird's note to him as he 
leaves in the morning. And some day he comes 
home, and she meets him not, and the house is still. 



EVOLUTION AND EELIOION. 117 

She is gone ! and there is nothing left for him in all 
this earth ; there is nothing left ! It is the last 
light that is quenched ! But, oh ! say to him now if 
you dare : "You will never see her again." Nay, 
evangel, say to him : " Tis but for an hour ! she 
is risen ! follow her and comfort yourself by her with 
the faith that when you see her again it will be in 
more of glory than ever entered into your heart to 
conceive." Science cannot destroy belief such as 
this of immortality after resurrection ; it cannot take 
it away ; it cannot destroy it, and it is the most 
precious boon we have in life — the faith that, through 
Jesus Christ, we shall live again, and live for ever. 

A Mature Judgment. 

And, now, it is not needful that I should push 
these investigations further. I am an honest man. 
I would not say a thing I did not believe myself. I 
am called to preach religious truths. I have 
preached a great many things that I was ignorant 
about, but I thought I knew them then. I have 
corrected in later life, upon reflection and experi- 
ence, statements that I had made in earlier life ; but 
I never in all my ministry stated an argument 
that I did not believe was valid. I never in all 
my life asked myself: "Will this be popular?" 
I never asked myself: "Will this be churchly?" 
I never asked myself: "Will this be orthodox?" 
I always said: "What is truth?" And I have a 
right at this late period of my life, when all human 
inducements are gone, and cannot tempt me more 
— I have a right to say that, having been now for 
fifty years a preacher of religion, and having seen 
year after year scientific developments, and having 
hailed with increasing confidence and joy this last 
great birth of the Divine idea in the creation of the 
world, I say to you as an honest man, and as a 



118 EVOLUTION AND KELIGION. 

Christian man, and as a Christian preacher, Evolu- 
tion is, in my judgment, the greatest blessing, not 
to biology, not to physiology, not to sociology, but to 
religion, and that when churches shall have thrown 
off their prejudice, and when more meditation and 
experiment shall have cleansed from one and 
another imperfect elements, the future of religion 
will bid fair to have free course to run, and be 
glorified, such as it has never had before. And when 
every doctrine of the pulpit runs down until it 
radicates itself in nature, when every man's state- 
ment of the truth finds itself rooted in the moral 
condition of the world and of the universe, there 
will be less scepticism, there will be less doubt, there 
will be less difficulty. I hail that day, and it is 
coming on ! I have lived to see the rising of the 
sun, and will live to see the mid-day glory. Eead — 
do not be afraid to exercise yourselves in growing 
knowledge. Eead books — they won't hurt you long 
if they hurt you at all. You will get over them. 
Eead — as I tell every young man in my congregation 
— read and study ; don't be afraid. A man that is 
a coward in religion has not any religion ; and so, 
with unspeakable gratitude, and with the utmost 
faith, and with a faith that grows by sight from 
period to period, I declare thanksgiving and 
gratitude to Him that gave our Lord Jesus Christ 
unto us, that He is now bringing round about Him 
and the Church of His love an illumination that in- 
dicates that the night is far spent and the day at 
hand. 



SERMONS AND PRAYERS. 



THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 



" But the greatest of these is love." — I Cor. xiii. 13. 

THE roots of this chapter are in the preceding chapter. It is 
a chapter of universal experience, a chapter of contention 
about peace, and of quarrelling about love, and of all manner 
of collisions and supersessions and criticism, — every man think- 
ing that he had just the gifts that made him chief, — lying over 
against each other in battle array in regard to orthodoxy, 
regularity, organisation, authenticity. They had the gifts of 
speech, some of them, and used them ; they had the gifts of 
teaching and misleading ; they had all sorts of gifts jumbled 
together, as we have seen them since in the ages, and may see 
them still if we have eyes to see. And the apostle .says that 
there are endless varieties, but it is God that worketh in them 
all ; different dispensations, different offices, functions, ex- 
periences, manifestations, but God is behind all that are true, 
and they have a certain unity in God. But while the apostle 
did not discredit what we may now more familiarly call the 
means of grace, he said, " Have all gifts of healing ? do all 
speak with tongues ? do all interpret ? But covet earnestly the 
best gifts. And yet show I unto you a more excellent way," 
" Shove the whole crowd out," he says, " and let me show you 
the royal road." And then he broke out into this magnificent 
hymn or chant of love ; and there has not yet risen that man 
inspired upon harp or organ or other instrument, not Beethoven 
himself, that has been able to put into music the grandeur 
of this anthem of eternity. We shall hear it chanted there ! 
Thus this lofty chant broke forth, as it were, in celebration of 
the coronation of love, and then all ceased. It could be seen 
that love was the one crowned truth of the universe ; that 
without it all things are vapid and useless, and with it all 
things, it might almost be said, are superfluous. 

But what is this love ? We have a pale moonshine of sen- 



4 The Essence of Religion. 

timentality that is sometimes supposed to represent the Scripture 
love. Men sometimes advocate a life of love and a theology 
of love, but have no idea of justice and of truth, of sound 
words of orthodoxy ; they advocate this mush of love. Now, 
the love which is the basis and sum of Christianity is some- 
thing grander than any specialisation of affection known to 
man. Nor is there, if peradventure it do not somewhat exist 
in the household, anything that is fit to be the type of that 
which the Spirit of God teaches us to be the love of Christ- 
ianity. For it is not a mild and feeble amiableness ; it is not 
a kind of charity that forgives men's faults, because it does not 
feel that they are faults, and has no conscience rebounding from 
evil. It is not merely morality, indifferent to everything that is 
not regular, and without any quick sense of good or evil, of 
the beauty of the one and the odiousness of the other. It is 
large, robust, discriminating, full of rectitude itself and the 
love of rectitude, full of moral discrimination, repulsed from 
evil and attracted to all that is beautiful and true and good. 
It is the whole man attuned to God's own nature, and, 
therefore, full of sympathy, full of kindness, full of fervent 
well-wishing to all sentient creatures. It does not disdain any- 
thing, the great love that God pours into great souls and little ; 
it does not disdain the flitting insect, nor the flocks and herds, 
nor the birds that build and sing ; but it has its full disclosure 
among men. It is that quality which shines out with benefi- 
cence upon all. As God makes His sun to rise upon the good 
and the bad, and sends His rain upon the just and the unjust; 
as He has a great orb of compassion and sympathy that 
showers down benediction upon men without regard to station 
or condition, or even character, so that love, when it is trans- 
mitted to human beings, is a compassion and a sympathy and 
a well-wishing that dodges nothing, reaches everything, de- 
scends to everything, is universal, continuous, habitual : it is 
the altitude of the soul ; it is the disposition in its moods of 
benefaction, consideration, sympathy, love ; and in that sense 
love itself is but a minor form of the great love. It asks 
nothing for itself; it has no second thought ; it asks only the 
liberty of bestowing kindness and affection and sympathy and 
all helpfulness. It sees faults, longing to correct them ; it sees 
sins, that it may heal them : it is the soul's physician going 
into the hospital where men are maimed and are sick, only to 
see how they may be succoured and helped. It is the soul's 
whole atmosphere poured forth upon others. Thus it is not a 



The Essence of Religion. 5 

faculty ; it is all the faculties and forces of the soul in a con- 
dition of imparting benefit, at any rate well-wishing, to all 
creatures. And thus it is a miniature God set up in the niche 
of our soul. 

• Now listen for a moment to this sweetest descant that ever 
was sung beneath the angel choir, and see if it does not compass 
substantially that which I have described rather than defined 
as the nature of a true Christian experience of love. 

" Love suffereth long." That does not seem very striking. 
It is very profound. You cannot tell the strength of one's love 
by the pleasure which he receives from loving. The test of 
loving is what any one is willing to suffer for the sake of the 
object beloved. All deep love takes the object, as it were, into 
its bosom ; carries its burdens, or would ; forgives its sin, or 
would ; suffers. And any man that has nobody to suffer for 
him in this world is God's orphan indeed. Children are 
blessed because there is a household love that suffers for them. 
There are no hearts in the union of love that do not know how 
to suffer for each other. "Love suffereth," not once or twice, 
as if upon exhibition, but " long." Long as the chord on the 
harp vibrates, long as the pipe of the organ, suitably ministered 
unto, sounds, so long the touched heart knows hew to suffer 
for those whom it loves. 

"Is kind." Kindness should certainly have a place some- 
where ; because piety is sometimes anything on earth but kind. 
It is acerb, it is stiff, it is homely, it is pretentious ; it is very 
good and very ugly. Piety ! It is enough to make a man run 
away from church to see some pious people. But love is kind, 
love is good-natured, and that stands society in hand often 
more than conscience itself. Love is gentle and kind. 

"Love envieth not." Nobody envies below himself; every- 
body envies those that are above him : therefore envying is 
covetousness, or worse ; it is the recognition of good fortune, 
or of attainment, or of power, or of something else in those 
that are above, and the man is angry at their goodness because 
it rebukes his meanness or his littleness. But love, never. 
You cannot bestow too much upon that which you love. A 
mother is sooner liable to bestow too much upon the babe of 
her bosom than a true heart to envy the gifts of those that are 
about him. What if they are better and more popular than you ? 
Thank God that there is some one better and more popular 
than you. What if they are wiser than you ? Thank God that 
there is one more star in the firmament above yourself. What 



6 The Essence of Religion. 

if they have the commendation of men while you have the dry 
bitter root to chew? Thank God that somewhere there is 
somebody that is not getting troubled as you are. There are 
tears enough and misfortunes enough, and there are burdens 
and cares laid on those that are eminent quite enough to keep 
them down in their own estate. Love never envies anybody. 
And, judged by that test note, a great deal of religion is 
spurious. 

" Love vaunteth not itself." It is not a braggart ; it does 
not every time it lays a golden egg rise from the nest and 
cackle. It "vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Oh, that 
there were some men that could be touched with a lancet ! 
How the puffed-upness would come down, and leave vacuity. 

Love " doth not behave unseemly," or uncivilly. It does 
not think that rude, hard words, an abrupt manner, a disagree- 
able honesty, are any more tests of sincerity and manhood 
than words that are agreeable to men. It is not uncivil. 

Love "seeketh not her own." That golden word that had 
been almost lost by forgetfulness luckily Paul brought into 
eternal remembrance, remembering the words of Him who 
said, " It is more blessed to give than to receive." This heresy 
the world has not yet acceded to. Selfishness says, " It is not 
orthodox : every man for himself; if every man took care of 
himself everybody would be taken care of; as for the sinful, 
the weak, the ignorant, those that are out of the way, no 
matter for them ; take care of yourself; make your strength 
selfishness ; make your knowledge selfishness ; call yourselves 
by holy names, and live like the devil." Love never does it. 
It " seeketh not her own." 

" Is not easily provoked." A wonderful grace is that ! not 
easily provoked by things that are provoking: to stand in 
misunderstanding ; to be yourself sensitive, and have all the 
insects flying in with stings on you, and not be irritated ; to 
have the armour of patience, this is an attainment much to be 
desired. There have been some specimens of it undoubtedly in 
the history of Christian experience. " Is not easily provoked." 

" Thinketh no evil." Now, that is too much. It cannot be 
expected that we should reach that ; that we should never have 
a secret pleasure in hearing some tale of a neighbour that 
thought himself pretty good ; that we should never repeat it 
with smiles : " Well, you know, he is a good man, but good 
men have their faults." So it comes to pass that these beau- 
tiful Christians sit down at a banquet like so many cannibals 



The Essence of Religion. 7 

eating up the reputation of their neighbours. " Thinketh no 
evil \ rejoiceth not in iniquity." Cynics, men that pretend to 
have such a knowledge of the world, think they cannot be 
deceived by sham, don't believe in sincerity, don't believe that 
there is any virtue that will not yield to temptation, don't 
believe but that every man has his price everywhere. The 
man may seem saintly, "Yes, but have you seen him behind 
the alcove ? " If I am told that there is anybody very good, 
or very holy, or very just, or very pure, I will be above such 
things as that, for the Divine love does not love such things — it 
"thinketh no evil, it rejoiceth not in iniquity." It will not 
thread the common sewers of life for the sake of finding out 
the worst elements to feed on. Many a muck-worm does it. 

" Rejoiceth in the truth." No matter if it is your enemy of 
whom you hear something better than you had supposed ; be 
glad that the man is better than you thought he was. Your 
own church is good — of course — and all things are orthodox ; 
but the church over the way ! Ah ! learn some of the things 
that have developed the true Christian life there. You ought 
to rejoice and be glad ; no matter where you see the truth of 
life, of duty, of self-denial, of holiness, accept it, and bless God 
that there is even a twinkling of heavenly light in the dark 
passages of this world. 

"Beareth all things." Love is a burden-bearer, and it 
rejoices in its burden. The nursery is God's commentary on 
atonement and on moral government. For where on earth is 
there such an instance as the mother, who counts it all joy to 
bear the child's feebleness and weakness and want, and by-and- 
by quarrelsomeness and sickness and aberration ? " Beareth 
all things," not saying " If I had been tried with such and such 
a trial, I could have endured it, but this ! " There is no this 
in true love. It is everything, it is anything. 

"Believeth all things." It trusts men. It does not mean 
that it believes every fugacious heresy or every rambling 
novelty ; but it has a mind credulous, childlike, confiding. 
Count Cavour, the Italian diplomat, said he was satisfied from 
his experience that more mistakes would be made by not 
trusting men than by believing in them and trusting them. If 
that is true in Italy and in diplomacy, good heavens ! where is it 
not true ? " Believeth all things," or, at any rate, if you cannot 
do that, " hopeth all things." 

" Endureth all things ; " and you will have to do that if you 
undertake to walk through life with this kind of Christian love. 



55 The Essence of Religion. 

Now I want to call your attention to the fact that this is the 
only note of true orthodoxy in the New Testament. Let me 
refer you to the Gospel of St. John, chap, xiii., v. 34 : " A new 
commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another. 1 ' 
Even late down in the history of this world this commandment 
was given as "new " ; and if he were present to-day, our dear 
Lord might, without changing a letter, say " A new command- 
ment I give unto you. As I have loved you in the greatness 
of the Divine compassion, in the largeness of the Divine sym- 
pathy, in the glory of the all-filling love in God, so love ye one 
another. By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, 
if ye love one another." Now, do you want to know how to 
find out whether a man is a disciple ? Go to the catechism : 
"What is your belief in respect to fore-ordination ? What do you 
think of predestination ? Do you believe in the Trinity ? Do 
you believe in the total depravity of the human race ? Do you 
believe that men are effectually called, that they can do nothing 
to help themselves, that they are born without any good or any 
possibility of doing good, until they are regenerated by the 
grace of God ? " By this time you begin to sweat. " Do you 
believe that an atonement was made to satisfy the law of God, 
that all men are under wrath and damnation until they aie 
brought by the Spirit of God to accept the benefits of the 
atonement of Jesus Christ, so that His righteousness is made 
righteousness unto them ? Do you believe in all these things? " 
" Yes, yes ; I believe." They swallow them at a gulp ! But I 
never yet have seen an examination for ordination or for ad- 
mission into a church that dared to sound this note of ortho- 
doxy, " Do you love one another ? " Yes ; here it is, in the 
Word of the Lord Jesus ; it is the one note by which we are 
to determine whether a man is orthodox or heterodox, whether 
he is converted or not converted. " By this shall man know 
that ye are My disciples, if ye love one another." But I shall 
have more to say on that subject in a moment ; I merely call 
your attention to it in passing. 

And now — for I have not finished this chapter — the grand 
est judgment seat is set, and before it is summoned, not man 
in his animal nature to be judged for vices, for wallowing in 
crime — not gross, cruel, avaricious conduct — that is not sum- 
moned ; but civilisation is summoned before the judgment 
seat, to be measured, and to have its contents and its nature 
marked down. And first comes all that is brilliant, and useful, 
and enticing, and cheery, and charming. "Though I speak 



The Essence of Religion. 9 

with the tongues of men." All harmony, all exquisite dis- 
course that fills the soul with feeling and knowledge, and the 
ear with rhythm, all that is entrancing, that is called up. All 
poets, and all the flowing measure of poetry that lifts men who 
are among the gross and visible into the ideal and the invisible, 
these are called. " Though I speak not only so, but am 
caught up by rapturous inspiration to speak things unpremedi- 
tated, and far beyond the ordinary purpose and vision of men, 
with the tongues, as it were, of angels, and have not love," 
how contemptuously he treats them ! I am become as sound- 
ing brass and tinkling cymbal — noise, noise ! There is not so 
pretentious an instrument in all the band as a drum, nor one 
so empty. The men that fill the air with laudation, the men 
after whom the crowds do flock, the men whose eulogy is 
glowing on the page from day to day, who walk forth crowned 
with human praises, without love, are worthless creatures. 

Then come from the cloisters and from libraries and from 
colleges men of knowledge. " Though I have the gift of 
prophecy p — which includes not alone the sagacity that fore- 
looks but the power of sagacious teaching — " and understand 
all mysteries," going down from the surface into the causes of 
things, from the apparent to the real, "and all knowledge." 
Bring up all these men from the laboratory, from the study of 
the rocks, from the observation of the stars, from chairs of 
philosophy ; bring all the men of knowledge together, and hear 
the word of the Lord saying unto them, " All your knowledge 
is as dust, all your knowledge of the present and of the past is 
nothing without the simple and solitary virtue, love." Life is 
without its key-note that has no love. 

Then come the last, the religious crowd. " Though I give 
all my goods to feed the poor." There is a great market. 
Men have got a deal of money together — it is not worth while 
asking how, but they have got it — and you find them standing 
on their feet and saying, " My silver and my gold do not bring 
happiness. Men say 'There is a rich man, but that is all 
there is of him ; ' I should be glad to be put upon stations of 
observation, I should be glad to have men giving me office and 
position." That is the trouble of these men. They have 
earned that which they thought would bring happiness, and 
they have paid out already those qualities of their soul from 
which happiness alone can spring in order to get the money, 
and now they go into the market and say, " Who will give me 
fame ? Who will give me reputation ? A thousand pounds 



io The Essence of Religion. 

for that college, and I shall get a title or a degree ; to the 
charities of the city, and I shall shine as a benefactor. I will 
give my goods — a good many of them ; the rest I prefer to 
retain till I die. I am willing when I make my will to do 
great things for the great charities that shall bear my name 
sounding down to posterity. Though I give all my goods tc 
feed the poor and have not love, I am nothing." Poor mis- 
erable demigod that thinks he can carry himself to the gate 
of heaven and enter in by a reputation which he bought 
with his money and without desert ! 

"Though I give my body to be burned, though my zeal 
mounts up to the very steeple, though I am willing to burn those 
who do not believe in true religion as I am willing to be 
burned for it too ; zealot, narrow, sharp, intense, I will live for 
the glory of God in my humility ; other men must look out for 
themselves ; I am living for religion, I am living for the 
church, for my church ; I am living for my orthodoxy, and 
God knows that I am willing to go to the stake for it." 

There are a hundred men willing to die at the stake that are 
not willing to take up the Cross, and live for their religion. 
It is often a great deal harder to live than to die. The 
vexations of life are a thousand times more painful than being 
burned or incarcerated. The zealous in religion, the narrow, 
the bigoted, the intolerable and the intolerant, without love 
they are nothing — mere walking shadows. I do not know 
whether you have among you a little insect that in America 
goes under the name cf " mosquito." They always say grace 
before they begin to suck your blood. Or, if they have not 
been feeding, you may see them on the wall transparent — there 
is nothing of them but the power to hum. Alas ! they are 
not all insects. When we think of the Kingdom of our Lord 
Jesus Christ and its history in this country under almost every 
name, it would seem that Golgotha had extended itself and 
covered the whole realm of Christianity. What a horrible be- 
trayal of Christ has been the history of the churches of Christian 
sects ! And even yet, though we are greatly advanced and 
the morning star of hope has risen over our horizon for the 
future, even yet is not the concord of Christian sects armed 
neutrality ? Is it not peace preparing for war ? 

Now let me bring home some of these views with a closer 
and more personal application. I wish you to see from the 
light of this view how easily we may distinguish between reli 
gion (Christian religion) and religion. Religion is the worship 



The Essence of Religion. 1 1 

the submission, the awe, which men feel for the great unknown 
God. There are thousands of men that bow themselves down 
and worship, but you shall look from end to end of the New 
Testament for the advocacy of that. It is not in the Lord's 
prayer, it is not anywhere in the Exhortation of the Apostle, it 
is not in the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ from the 
beginning to the end. The whole New Testament pivots on 
this golden point, " Thou shalt love." At twelve o'clock at 
night, from out of a hundred or a thousand steeples goes forth 
the solemn bell, striking the last hours ; and every one of 
them strikes twelve — some in tenor tone, some in deep 
resounding bass, and with every variation of pure tone or 
clangour, but every one of them far and near strikes twelve. 
There are ten thousand things in the New Testament, and 
unfolded in human life there are ten thousand things of 
thought, of fancy, of feeling ; but every one of them strikes at 
the hour this one sovereign note, " Love " — some in one way, 
some in another, some through intellectual influence, some 
through the ascetic feeling, some through emotion, some 
organised, some disorganised; but every one of the great 
truths of the New Testament strikes Love. 

Now in regard to religion instituted, organised into life, it 
is quite possible that men may change their theological creed, 
and not in the slightest degree disarrange religion. It is pos- 
sible to reform creeds ; apparently it is almost impossible, but 
ideally and conceptionally men may change their creed in 
order to keep their true religion. Or it may be that the creeds 
of the Middle Ages, framed in times of war, and armed like 
the old castles on the Rhine to repel invasion and to protect 
the interior, may be found as unfit for modern habits of 
thought as the old armour of steel and chain are unfit for the 
civic dress of to-day in times of peace. Still, the old corslet, 
the old helmet, the greaves, the armlets, and the gloved hands 
go clanking along the ways of orthodoxy, weighed down with 
the forms of thought that were necessary for certain ages and 
periods of the world. But we take off these things, and reduce 
men to habiliments that are comfortable and suitable. " Oh, 
there is no telling, if you once abandon the old ways, where 
you will bring up." You will bring up in heaven, if you 
abandon them in the right way ; but if you do not, it is uncer- 
tain where you will bring up. You can change instituted 
religion, you may change it as easily as a farmer can change 
his implements ; to-day it is one hoe. to-morrow it is a lighter 



12 The Essence of Religion. 

pne; to-day it is one plough, to-morrow it may be a better 
one ; to-day it is one threshing machine, to-morrow it may be 
another. When we come to spiritual husbandry, men want to 
plough with an old stick because their ancestors did so. It is 
true that implements are being changed by which the religious 
life is cultivated, instructed, built up. God forbid that I should 
undervalue the use of institutions; and God forbid that I 
should seem idolatrous of them. They are the servants of 
men, according to the Word of our Lord and Master : " The 
Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." The 
Sabbath is my slave; I say to it, "go" or "come." It was 
made for me, and I will take no orders from it, and no man 
shall impose any orders on me from it. I love it ; I love it 
with the associations of my heart ; I love it with the history of 
all the sweet truths that have blossomed on that fragrant day, 
but it is not my master ; I am a free man, and if men say, 
" You must not change it, it must be on the seventh day, and 
not on the first day," who are you to be idolaters of outside 
things? I hold it spiritually; I love it. If men say that all 
denominations must worship alike — oh ! what a mirage has 
been before the Church for ages ! — hunting after that delusive 
conception of unity. There never was and there never will be 
unity of doctrine, because men's minds are not alike. There 
never will be unity of theories of government, because some 
men are democratic and some are aristocratic in their cradles. 
There never will be unity in regard to any of the educating 
apparatus of the Church. The only unity this world will ever 
see, or that God wants it to see, is unity of spirit, unity of 
love, of sympathy, of helpfulness. And that is gradually going 
on. Those flowers that come earliest in the spring disappear 
earliest ; they are sweet, they are beautiful. But all through 
the torrid summer there are some flowers that are breeding 
themselves for days of frost ; the chrysanthemum, the aster, 
that bloom in the hedges of our fields and forests, and many 
another, come late, even into the winter itself. And there be 
many glorious things that the early morning of the world has 
not produced, but little by little there are roots which draw 
sustenance from the soil, and when the world grows older, we 
shall not be without flowers that defy the frost, that lift up 
their cheek to it that they may be kissed and become more 
beautiful. Instruments may change, theologies in so far as 
their philosophy is concerned — not the actual and fundamental 
facts out of which theological systems are built — they should 



The Essence of Religion. 13 

not change unless they have been obscured; they may be 
cleansed, they may be burnished, they may be touched with 
the chisel here and there ; for large theology is like the ruins 
of Palmyra or Tadmor, here a capital, there a part of a shaft, 
and yonder a frieze, and the edges are worn away and wasted ; 
men gather them up and restore them in some faint degree. 
So one may bring out lines of fact or of theology ; but there is 
no sacredness in a human system ; there is no reason why men 
should be idolatrous of creeds or dogmas. In every other 
department of life, of literary life, of scholastic life, science, 
music, men at last have been liberated, and are free to graft on 
old knowledge new branches, and to bring forth truth in 
clearer aspects than ever it had been seen in before. Only in 
the most glorious department of human life is there yet linger- 
ing a fear to touch the old exposition lest the whole should be 
destroyed. You cannot destroy God; you cannot destroy 
human nature that echoes to God. There will be religion, 
and as the times grow better and as truer understanding and 
the instinct of love are developed it will unfold itself, and 
intelligent, spiritual liberty will give us orthodoxy, no matter 
in what form it expresses itself. It is always safe to trust the 
moral experience of an enlightened, free, Christian community 
— not of every individual, but of the body collectively. 

Then I may possibly — if I were in Brooklyn I should 
without any hesitation — apply this subject to the inquiry, 
what is the true church ? That is the true church which pro- 
duces and is adapted to produce the largest harvest of love. 
You cannot test a church by its history ; you cannot test a 
church by its logic, nor by its concatenations of argument. 
That is the true church that is most nearly allied to the mind 
and spirit of Jesus Christ, and the mind and spirit of Jesus 
Christ is that God so loved the world that He gave His Son to 
die for it. Greater love hath no man than that He laid down 
His life for His friends ; that is the interpretation. That, 
then, is the true Church ; not that which is largest, or the 
most numerous, or the most decorated, or the most acerb in 
its theology, or the most historic in its claims ; but that which 
continually brings forth the sweet fruits of righteousness in 
the form of love. God be thanked, there are grand, true 
churches in the communion of the catholic church ; there are 
holy men among them, and there are churches under their 
administrations where I see unfolded the sweetest and choicest 
flowers in the garden of the Lord. Humble they are ; so is the 



14 The Essence of Religion. 

violet. Unpretentious they are, not widely grown ; neither is 
the vine. But we know that they are gardens of the Lord. 
Churches there are round about whose boundaries tower the 
hollyhock and the pretentious sunflower, and nothing besides. 
Churches that bring forth righteousness, and are adapted to 
bring forth in their ruling ideas all the sweet fruits of the 
Spirit of God, they have the note that they are of the Church 
of Jesus Christ. 

Now, what is conversion ? We hear a great deal about it. 
Conversion is the kindling in a soul of the light of love. No 
man is illuminated at conversion entirely : it is the rising light 
that shines brighter and brighter unto the perfect day. Before 
every part of the vast chamber of the human soul shall receive 
its light, time and suffering and experience must be passed 
through ; but the beginning of the life of love — that, and only 
that, is conversion. Some men think that they are converted 
because they had a horrible conviction, and because they said 
they were brought out of the miry clay and had their feet set 
upon the rock. They look back to that experience, and they 
say, "I was converted at four o'clock in the afternoon on the 
ioth of June, eighteen hundred and so and so.'' Your clock 
may be right, but the thing itself is not perhaps worthy of a 
revelation ; for I have not been able to perceive that you are 
a particle less proud ; I think on some grounds you have 
been more avaricious ; I think you have traded on your repu- 
tation for piety ; I think you have taken on airs by reason of 
your supposed now superiority. There are a thousand reasons 
why I do not think many conversions are good because they 
do not bring forth the fruit of love. When a man is converted 
he says, " I saw a great light." It was nothing but a tallow 
candle, and the wind blew it out very soon. Yet the man 
carries round his snuffed- out candle and says, " I was con- 
verted." Some men who are converted carry about their 
lamps which are known by the smoking of the unburnt 
material, and they think that they have got a light. Conver- 
sions are like the dawn of the morning ; they come and irra- 
diate the very dewdrops and change them to jewels ; they 
wake all birds, they wake all hearts and melodies. Why, 
when a man has entered into the spiritual elements and 
knows what it means to be Christ's man, loving God and 
loving everybody, he begins to feel and wonder if there is any- 
thing on God's earth that is so ecstatic as love. If it is 
beautiful to love a single one by elective affinity, if the 



The Essence of Religion. 15 

love by sympathy includes all men, is it lessened ? It is 
glorified. 

But time passes, and your patience is in danger of being 
exhausted. This thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the 
Corinthians is in no danger of being exhausted. Let me say 
to many that I shall never speak to again, unless peradventure 
it be when we grasp hands and walk into the gate of the 
Blessed, I call you to Christ and to Christian religion ; I call 
you to no penance, to no seclusion, not to cloisters ; I call you 
to life and liberty in Christ Jesus ; I call you to love, for the 
noblest thing in this wide world is a man intelligent and wise, 
and meant to be a child of God by having kindled in him the 
radiance and warmth of a true Chris ian life. For him all 
mirth comes dancing, at his service ; for him comes humour, 
like the dew on flowers ; for him comes all trust, for him all 
courage, for him all liberty ; for the more we learn automa- 
tically to obey the laws of Our spiritual being the more we are 
enfranchised. Men that are in the lower stages of obedience 
to the foolish laws of society are all of them in bondage ; but 
when the man has grown above all these things and becomes a 
law unto himself, and he does the things that are best not 
because he is commanded by the Church, or by the creed, or 
by public sentiment, but because in the spontaneousness of 
his own heart he wants to do these things, he does them to 
please himself ; he is a law to himself. Do you suppose that 
I forbear picking pockets as I walk along the street for fear of 
the policeman? If there was not a policeman in London I 
would not pick anybody's pocket. That is out of something 
in me. There is no temptation in burglary to me. I might 
pass ten thousand shops and I would not get drunk. I have 
risen, at least, so high in the scale of liberty, that I perform 
the social duties of life almost unthinkingly, and, in so far as 
the motive is looked for, it is a motive unspeakably higher 
than that of fear. I call you out of the bondage of fear, I call 
you into the resurrection of the new life, that you may have 
the liberty of the sons of God. 

Of all things most admirable and sweet in this world is the 
man that, not standing upon his own dignity, nor fencing him- 
self off by his privilege or his superiority, carries in himself the 
full choir of Christian graces and virtues. 

One word in closing. I now come back to the text. The 
Apostle says, While love never fails, while love is the one 
immortal thing on earth, all other things are changing, and 



1 6 The Essence of Religion. 

must change. Knowledge shall fail, prophecy shall pass away, 
and for this reason, that we are. in our limited state of under- 
standing, only dealing with spots and fragments of the truth. 
That great republic of worlds, of which this is but one single 
province, what do we know of it? What does a man know of 
an engine by one wheel ? What would a man know about a 
watch and its powers of performance by simply seeing a main- 
spring lying on a table ? We are in the condition of a 
dishevelled machine: we know in part, we know spots and 
fragments. By-and-by, says the Apostle Paul, as the ignorance 
of childhood ripens into a perfect knowledge in manhood, so 
our earthly ignorance and limitations will ripen when we come 
to a world where we shall know as also we are known. All 
things perish in this life except disposition. Genius, philo- 
sophy, all forms of ritual worship, all forms of voluntary 
worship, — everything is stamped with the relativity which 
belongs to this state of being. It is the imperfect expres- 
sion of only an imperfect part of an unknown system ; but 
by-and-by we shall know as we are known. There are three 
things that death itself does not change. It takes our wealth, 
our raiment, our friends, our honour, ten thousand things in 
life death despoils ; but there are some things that the tooth of 
death cannot gnaw ; there are some things that the hot iron 
blades of death cannot touch. What are these? "Abideth 
faith" — not relative to this life, but belonging to eternity, 
" faith, hope, and love." The foremost and greatest of these 
is love. And, when in the great coming day you and I should 
mount up as upon angel wing, they that have best on earth 
represented the Divine element of love, feeling the attraction 
of God Himself, on golden wings shall outrun all others 
and enter heaven a rejoicing crowd. May the Lord Jesus 
Christ bring you unto the fulness and glory of this Divine 
experience ! 



CHRISTIAN SELF-DENIAL. 



" Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after Me, 
let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." — Matt. 
xvi. 24. 

THIS period in which we are living is a period of great 
doubt. [Mr. Beecher, who spoke from a platform under 
the pulpit, began in a very low tone of voice, and at the end of 
the first sentence there were cries of " Pulpit ! " and " Can't 
hear !" from the congregation.] If you will make less noise 
you will hear me before I get through. As to the pulpit I think 
about it as Daniel Webster did ; he regarded the continuance 
of religion in this world, in spite of pulpits, to be one of ths 
signs of its divinity. I suppose pulpits were originally framed 
after the apocalyptic vision of a candlestick, and ministers have 
been too much like wax candles in candlesticks, hard and stiff, 
with very little light. No man would ever undertake to plead 
for the life of a fellow-man out of a pulpit. No man would ever 
undertake to go before a crowd for votes and be perched up on 
the top end of a candlestick. When a man is in earnest in 
preaching he ought to preach from the top of his head to his 
toe. It is not the voice alone ; it is the man informed with his 
subject that preaches. 

I was saying that this is an age of great doubt and uncer- 
tainty on the subject of religion. The mist comes up from 
two directions ; on the one hand, it comes from the realm of 
science, and, on the other hand, it issues out of the Church 
itself; and multitudes of men are as much affected and 
repelled by the prevalent impressions of Christianity which 
have been derived from the Church as they are repelled by the 
yet unripe conclusions of science itself. For a multitude of 



1 8 Christian Self- Denial, 

men regard religion as only a kind of bondage which no man 
would tolerate for a moment except for the hope of what he 
will get for it by-and-by. It is thought to be a restriction of 
liberty. Instead of presenting a joyous face to them, religion 
is veiled or gloomed. They hold that it would be better, 
perhaps, for a man to be a Christian than to be damned, but 
only about that ; that if it can be deferred safely, and if there 
may be such a thing as a compromise on a death-bed, why 
then the man who tries to get all he can out of this world, 
all that he can out of society, all that he can get out any- 
where, and anyhow, is wiser than the man who cheats himself 
all through life, and is no better off at death than he who has 
had a good time. There is in the mind of youth an impres- 
sion of this kind, that it is a sad and sorrowful course for a 
man to pursue, and this runs parallel with another experience, 
that of Christian people themselves. My own impression is 
that the ideas of the Christian Church have been so largely 
derived from the fuliginous atmosphere of the ascetic that we 
now almost always read the Bible through that glamour. We think 
that religion is really a sorrowful thing, that it is a medicine, 
bitter, sharp, continuous, that we cannot get well unless we 
have all the pain and poverty that is consistent with the 
development of an ordinary practical life. Nay, more ; there 
is an impression that suffering is a badge of piety, and is the 
antithesis of nature. There is a strong feeling that joy is to be 
had very sparingly, a mere sweet to be handled with the fingers 
after the main meal, and little of it ; that it is to be regarded 
with suspicion as being at variance with sanctity. If a man is 
at once, in the testimony of those who know him, sound in 
justice and in good sense, large and liberal, sweet as summer 
and fragrant as all its flowers, and yet is gay, " Oh ! " it is said, 
"that is a single case ; he is eccentric." For still men cling to 
the idea that piety and a certain restriction of joy are synony- 
mous ; that sobriety of face, a stern, hard expression of con- 
science and of will, are more nearly the representatives of a 
sanctified state than the genial, smiling, humorous, elastic 
ways of life. All these are the results of a false interpretation 
of sacred Scripture as it is seen through the atmosphere which 
has been created by the school of ascetics, who believed that 
God cursed the world when He made it (they ought to have 
believed so ; it is the logical sequence of their position) • who 
believed that man, being created, was excommunicated, as it 



Christian Se/f-Denia/. 19 

were, not altogether on his own account, but on account of a 
derivative guilt from an ancestor whom he never saw, and in 
whose sin he had never any concern, but he was to have the 
dividends of the transaction to the end of time ; that he was 
so cursed in consequence of the paternal sin as that he was 
utterly devoid of all good, unable to accomplish it, absolutely 
outside of any true function of grace, and that the exercise of 
the powers of the mind, as they are born in nature, along the 
line of God's inevitable decree, is always sinful, and not until 
a certain something called Grace is infused has any action of 
a man's reason, moral sense, or affections any validity before 
God. And so, as the world is a perpetual scene of temptation, 
and as in the unregenerate state men are without moral ability 
and without any capacity of doing anything that is good, the 
ascetic holds that he must mortify everything, and as certain 
views founded in truth come with nature they must be set 
aside. As ordinary good natures springing from happy consti- 
tutions are liable to be mistaken for Grace, you must mortify 
them. So men, misinterpreting the phraseology of Scripture, 
talk about crucifying themselves, whereas in the New Testa- 
ment you have not any such thing ; never once is it declared 
that man must crucify himself. We are told that we are to 
crucify the old man, with his lusts, the animal man ; for the 
true man is a social creature, intellectual, emotive, superin- 
duced upon the animal, and the animal is perpetually acting 
with strength and priority of existence ; for the animal comes 
before the man. It is held in the New Testament that we are 
to put the animal under ; to be sure we are. Now, under 
these interpretations of the ascetic school men often feel that 
joy is a temptation, one of the devil's worst lures, and that a 
man had better be sorrowful in this life, if he can only get 
enough for it in the other. Therefore, it is thought that the 
man who macerates his flesh, wears his hair shirt, flagellates 
himself, and prays a good deal, shuts himself in a cloister, or 
in the cell, or in the cathedral, as the case may be, that the 
man who goes glooming through the world as a skeleton is the 
saint ; whereas a robust man, rubicund, genial, going through 
life both happy and diffusing happiness — well, he may be a 
good enough citizen, but the idea of his being a saint ! Who 
ever saw a fat saint? (Laughter.) I know that a great many 
of my brethren think that laughing in church is very wicked, 
but there is more grace in an honest laugh oftentimes than 



20 Christian Self- Denial. 

there is in a prayer or in any form of self-denial. Conscience 
is a good thing when it works in sunshine and love, but when 
it works in acerbity conscience is a bulldog that sits at the 
door and keeps out less mischief than it lets in. 

Now, against all these false notions, I declare that the ideal 
of the Christianity in the New Testament, by any fair interpre- 
tation of the whole of it, is that it is a reltase from bondage, 
not an entrance into it ; that it gives larger liberty to every part 
of man's nature, that it brings life, not gloom, joyfulness in 
overflowing measure ; not merely what may bet echnically called 
religious joyfulness, that is to say, joyfulness as in the presence 
of God Himself, and when thinking upon religious topics ; but 
I hold that a true Christian development in man, formed after 
the pattern of Jesus Christ, is full of joy of every kind from 
the lowest to the highest scale; and as in the harp the 
deepest note of every chord all the way up to the shrillest 
is musical, so in a truly Christian disposition we have the right 
of joyfulness in all things that are becoming manhood and 
womanhood. 

What, then, are we to understand by such passages as our 
text, and such words as these, " Strive to enter in at the strait 
gate. Many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and shall 
not be able " ? Is religion, then, a cloistered thing ? Is it a 
special treasure that none may have except by the most vehe- 
ment exertions ? is it something that God is keeping to Him* 
self, and gives men only on rare occasions a taste thereof ? 
And self-denial and cross-bearing, are we to understand by 
them that religion is, after all, an experience of well-borne sor- 
row ; that men are to begin on crutches, and limp on crutches 
all the way through their life ? 

I have already alluded to the fact that man is of a compo- 
site nature, and that in the order of time and nature both, 
he is first an animal, and of all animals the latest in coming 
to himself. For there is nothing in all the earth so far from 
himself as a human being when he is firstborn, with eyes that 
cannot see, ears that cannot hear, hands that cannot feel, feet 
that cannot walk ; whatever there may be potential in him 
undeveloped, he is a mere sucking animal, and that at the 
lowest. The fly is a full fly in a minute ; a colt is a full colt 
in less than a week ; a calf comes to itself very soon — it has 
not got a great way to travel — but man has to travel a great 
way before he finds himself. He begins at the bottom, at 



Christian Self-Denial. 21 

zero, and gradually attaches figures that give value to the zero 
on the way up. The things that are necessary for the animal 
life of a being in the material globe are very strong in him, 
as they must needs be, and so come the nourishing appetites 
that may easily be perverted into gluttonness and drunken- 
ness, also the protective elements which defend him against 
aggression, as if they brought out in each individual the condi- 
tion of human society when all were savage and every man's 
life depended upon his power of defending himself; combative, 
destructive, with a sense of his own personal worth and dignity 
which we now call pride, but which towered up in the early days 
as that element of selfness which it was his duty to defend, in life. 
We are born animals, but not far along on the way we find be- 
ginning the buds of something far more beautiful and noble 
than the animal, and they break out into fragrance and affec- 
tion in the soul. After a time, if these be cherished, they rise 
from the mere domestic realm of personal relation into larger 
affection, into goodwill and benevolence ; the man rises from 
instinct to intelligence, from intelligence in accepting the things 
obvious to the senses, the percipient intelligence, into reflec- 
tive intelligence ; and then by thought he ranges from the 
throne itself to the footstool, back and forth, with ever-widen- 
ing circuits. Then we find that there is developed in those 
that still grow, liberty not restrained by philosophy or by 
any other thing of that kind ; but men that have an inspira- 
to develop come to the spiritual element, and as all below 
that had cognisance of things seen, as all truth had to come 
below that to the sensuous man, to the ear, to the eye, to the 
taste, to the hand, to form, and to visibility, so we come to 
the realm in which the invisible predominates, and we become 
the creators there, and fashion things not only after the 
manner of their combinations among us, but higher than that 
we enter the realm of Faith — the great realm of imagination 
which, when it is sanctified in religious use, we call Faith, but 
which is a gift of God in all its shapes and forms. Already, 
while our roots are in the soil, our top moves in the great realm 
of Faith, and we have the power given us somewhat of God 
Himself, and we go forth touching with colour, with propor- 
tion, with all quality, the things that are not real, but are more 
real than things that are real. 

Now, in this great multiplicity of constitution, to which I 
have given but the barest thought, in this richness of faculty 



22 Christian Self- Denial. 

there is, of course, a great contention which part shall govern. 
As in every commonwealth there must be an upper, and 
middle, and lower, so it is in the commonwealth of the 
human soul. By nature it is the animal that wants to pre- 
dominate, but no ! it is restricted, and to a certain degree 
qualified by the decencies of social life, that repress a thousand 
things that in the savage life are permitted to go forth free. 
And whenever any animal instinct would raise itself up against 
any purity of the household, the purity, the instinct of love 
says, " Down ! down ! " and it is denied. Man denies him- 
self ; the under is put under, that the upper may be regent ; 
and whenever in the yet higher realm of duty, conscience, 
justice, equity, kindness, there rise up social affections or 
animal instincts, then the higher quality in the mind says to 
the man, "Be still; rest — know your place" — and we deny 
ourselves again. And if we call, as St. Paul did, all the way 
through (for he was a Darwinian without knowing it) — if we 
call a man a double man, the flesh and the spirit man, self- 
denial may be briefly defined as being the suppression of the 
under man by the authority of the upper man ; it is not deny- 
ing things that are pleasant, but it is denying to ourselves the 
things that are inferior and wrong for the sake of giving 
ascendency, blossom, and fruitfulness to the things that are 
right. That is the whole limit of self-denial and cross-bearing ; 
it is the repression of the under by the upper ; and it is painful 
or not painful just according to the rude and uneducated con- 
dition of the man. In itself the instinct of benevolence, when 
it is ripened into a principle of benevolence, gives more joy 
when it puts avarice down than would have come from avarice 
permitted to have its full range, a thousand fold. Where 
temper would burn and kindness suppresses it, the kindness 
fills the soul with a joy and a peace that never would be known 
by anger. Where the upper qualities prevail, they grow lumi- 
nous as they go up, they are sweeter as they ascend, they are 
nobler in every way, and the upper man, the topmost man, the 
man who loves God, conscious of the eternal, the invisible, 
and the immortal, that part of him is strung to a musical 
power that is not known in the grumbling base of the lower 
animal passions of mankind. So, then, self-denial itself, when 
you come to see exactly what it is, is that which we experience 
along the line of every single step of development in human 
life. I would fain be a musician— some youngster in my 



Christian Self-Denial. 23 

neighbourhood is trying to be — and, oh, what work he makes 
of it ! I know perfectly well if I could be a Paganini, how 
beautiful it would be. But before a man gets there, he has to 
deny himself in a great many ways for a good while. Every 
time that a man, in the process of education, ascends from 
ignorance to knowledge, and from one department of know- 
ledge to another, he has got to give up a good deal of bodily 
rest, a good deal of diffused and dissipating society and plea- 
sure ; he has got to limit himself in his directions. No man 
can become an eminent chemist without great self-denial; no 
man can become a great geologist without great self-denial ; 
no man can learn languages without great self-denial. We do 
not call it self denial in secular things, but when we find it 
mentioned in Christian relations, Christian ethics, then it is an 
ecclesiastical something, which is very different. But self- 
denial does not belong to Christianity, it belongs to humanity. 
Self-denial is that by which we put down the inferior things for 
the sake of the ascendency of superior things. It runs in 
music, it runs in the painter's art, it runs in sculpture and in 
architecture, it runs in husbandry and in statesmanship, it runs 
ever)'where. There is not in the world any way by which a 
man comes to himself in the higher realms, except by steps 
of self-denial ; and when Christ says, with larger scope and 
more profound spiritual meaning : " If any man would come 
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow 
Me," it is a truth as wide as the spheres ; but how different in 
the understandings of men from what it was in the pronuncia- 
tion of our Master ! 

Well, when self-denial has become facile : when you have 
learned, if I might so say, the trade of self-denial, it not only 
becomes easy relatively,, but it loses much of its painfuWss. 
If in a family of robust children a child is governed from 
the beginning, it is easy for him to give up his will to parental 
authority ; but if the mother's love is so weak that she cannot 
dare to restrain her child, the child may run riot, and by-and- 
by, when the time comes when she attempts to restrain him, 
she will have a time of it, and he will have a time of it. 
And so in regard to self-denial in religious life. If men were 
brought up to understand what it is, to identify it, and give 
it a large sphere in their daily Christian experiences, self- 
denial would not be so very painful. I have got so that I 
do not deny myself a whit in some things. I see a great 



24 Christian Self- Denial. 

many whose pockets I could pick, and they would very amply 
rill mine ; but I never do it. It is not because it is so very 
painful to restrain; on the contrary, I should rather suffer if I 
did do it. I behold a man's garden full of fruit and flowers ; 
I do not leap the boundary and rob it. There is, it may be, 
a faint animal insinuation: "It won't hurt him, and it will 
advantage you;" nevertheless, there is a Chief Justice who 
sits up there and says : " For shame ! for your own sake avoid 
it ! " and it is for my own sake that I avoid it. I find no 
difficulty in regard to cheating and lying — that is, except in 
that form of incidental lying which everybody practises. (Ex- 
pressions of surprise.) I believe there are folks who do not 
lie in thought or in feeling ; but they are all in heaven. On 
earth, when a man so lives that everybody can see him inside 
and out, from his perfect truthfulness, — when a man speaks 
the truth absolutely he has got to be a man so good that the 
Lord does not keep him here long. I do not, of course, 
speak of vulgar bluntness, but I speak of that state of mind 
in which the love of the truth in the very inward parts pre- 
vails and dominates the life ; the yea is yea, and the nay is 
nay, and there is no shading off of either of them. Every 
self-denial ought, therefore, to give place to the pleasure of a 
higher quality. Where men are living in habitual self-denial 
they very soon efface the pain ; the subject passions learn to 
submit so easily that there is very little sense of suffering. 
Now and then exigencies, now and then catastrophes come ; 
now and then there is some great experience that goes athwart 
the life like a comet full of terror sweeping its train along; 
now and then there are new necessities ; but in all the ordinary 
commerce of life men ought so to deny themselves as to 
subdue the recurrent powers, and it becomes an established 
habit as easy as breathing itself. The great trouble of self- 
denial is that a man often denies himself something for to-day, 
and takes it up again for to-morrow ; he denies himself in 
church and forgets all about it out-of-doors. It is the want of 
thoroughness in self-denial that makes it at all painful to men, 
except in occasional exigencies. 

Before I leave this thought, let me give expression once 
more, and by illustration, to what I believe to be the great 
mistake of men in judging from the Scriptures what the real 
ideal conduct of a Christian man is. For there can be no 
question that the letter of Scripture in manifold places would 



Christian Self- Denial. 25 

seem to inculcate a course of suffering. Well, go with me into 
a hospital (for this great world is one vast hospital), and here 
in the wards are consumptive patients, dropsical patients 5 
fever-stricken patients, men lopped of an arm or a leg. Go 
round and see the prescriptions that are given. There is one 
shivering with malarial fever, and to him the physician gives 
quinine. When he gets up and goes out of the hospital, he 
says, " My dear, the prescription that brought me to health 
was quinine ; I want to have it on the table every day ; we 
will have it for breakfast, dinner, and supper." Quinine was 
very good for medicine ; it is a very poor thing for bread. 
Another man is told that by reason of some infirmity of 
joint or muscle, he must help himself with a crutch; and 
after that he worships the crutch, and when he has got 
entirely well, still goes crutching round ; because the physi- 
cian prescribed it, he is going to stick to it — he is not 
going to vary the receipt. Where men are, as mankind is, 
malformed in every form of disproportion in themselves, where 
they are in process of recovery, as the race is everywhere, there 
are many things necessary to them as medicine or adjuvants ; 
but as soon as it is possible we lay aside these exterior things^ 
indispensable as they may be in the primary stages. Their 
design is to help a man to get rid of them, as the design of 
medicine is to make a man healthy, Suppose a man should 
undertake to lecture on the subject of health, and should take 
for his text the hospital, and say, " A healthy man lives always 
— I can prove it to you — in a hospital;" suppose he were 
to say, "We are eating all agreeable things here ; I will show 
you the jalap and various other things in the hospital.' 
You won't dispute the authority of the hospital. But men 
go to the New Testament for prescriptions, forgetting the 
unfoldment, the further development ; they stick to the old 
things, the early things, not for a moment thinking that it 
is necessary to go on to perfection. There are some folks 
who believe that they have come to be perfect ; and I do not 
know but they have, because it does not take much to perfect 
what some men have got in them, — they have not got much. 
It is a quarrel often about definitions ; only this is true, that 
a man who is broad of endowment in this world will never, to 
the day of his death, get rid, in some things, and in some 
directions, of the command, " Deny thyself." But the behind, 
the experience of the past ought to be in every man's Christian 



26 Christian Self- Denial. 

experience one of the victories. No man knows anything 
until he knows it so that he has forgotten that he does know 
it. No man is fit to be an arithmetician that has to stop, as 
I do, to count on his ringers. The banker, the broker, the 
arithmetician, the mathematician, runs the figures up almost 
without seeing them ; he has conquered it. In every respect 
a man that has conquered his temper, conquered his avarice, 
has no longer any trouble ; it is intuitional with him, it becomes 
automatic; until it is that it is green, unripe, imperfect in 
way. 

Now there are many of you — I know what you think — who 
will say, " This is ingenious." Some of you will not even 
admit that merit ; you will think it is all wrong and mis- 
leading, and I shall have this question propounded to me, 
" What do you say of Christ's example ? And He makes 
makes this the test, " If any man would come after Me let him 
deny himself and take up his cross, and follow Me." Then 
will come up the apothegm, " Christ was often seen to weep; 
never to laugh." Is that an argument ? Where is there a 
passage that says that He did not laugh ? I believe He did. 
He is called " a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." 
Yes, He had mighty sorrows, He experienced great grief; but 
don't tell me that Christ was not a happy man. I believe 
Him to have been the happiest man that ever dawned above 
the horizon of time in earthly condition. Do you suppose 
that such a being, exercising the greatest part of a man's 
nature, His moral nature — bearing in mind that it is more 
blessed to give than to receive, by His own testimony — do 
you believe that such a being as He could live in the midst 
of so much want and trouble, to allay the trouble, staunch 
the tears, encourage the doubting, heal the sick — do you 
suppose that He stood and commanded the bier which bore 
the only son of a widow, and raised him to life, and gave 
him back to her, and that He stood like an icicle, that He 
saw it all, and did not feel, did not care ? Do you not sup- 
pose that even her heart itself could not have had the same 
exquisite satisfaction that His heart had ? When He went to 
Jairus to raise his daughter and the sweet maiden came back, 
and the hearts of father and mother were melted with joy and 
gratitude, do you suppose that He had not some sweet 
thought who had done all this ? Do you suppose that He 
who raised the dead, gave sight to the blind, wholeness to the 



Christian Se/j-DeniaL 27 

lame, purity to the leper — that in all this world of wonder 
Christ was not happy ? I think there was no creature, in 
Palestine so happy as He was. 

Did it ever occur to you that He drew a contrast between 
Himself and the ascetic religion, the religion of forms and 
rigorous duties ? "John came," He says, " neither eating nor 
drinking." John, you know, was one of the precisionists, one 
of those ortho-Christians ; and Christ says that the effect pro- 
duced upon the mob was that he was crazy, " he hath a devil." 
But " the Son of Man came eating and drinking '' ; that is, He 
was not like John, who kept himself in the wilderness, who saw 
only the shady side of human nature, who was a reformer with 
the hammer of truth in his hand. The Son of Man came 
socially. The first act that He performed was the miracle in 
Cana of Galilee where He created wine to continue the hilarity 
on the occasion ; and over those wine pots more men are 
stumbling to-day almost than over any other difficulty in Scrip- 
ture. Now, of all social festivities known to the Jewish calen- 
dar there was not one that exceeded in joyfulness the marriage 
supper ; and He was not only present, but an actor in that. 
Do you suppose that He had no joy of love? When the young 
man came running to Him, saying : " Good Master, what shall 
I do that I may inherit eternal life ? " when He had questioned 
him, it is said that He looked upon and loved him. It was 
one of those spontaneous bursts to which Christ's nature was 
addicted, and to which all natures of eminent genius are ad- 
dicted. Do you suppose that when, in the midst of His ser- 
mon, they sent little children to Him, He took no comfort and 
joy ? Do you suppose He talked catechism to them ? Do 
you suppose he taught them little hymns ? No. What did He 
do ? He took them up in His arms, laid His hands upon 
them, and blessed them ; He caressed them, and, what is the 
most remarkable thing, for you know how shy children are with 
strangers, they liked it. What was the atmosphere, what was 
the presence of Christ, that the little vagrant children that 
were brought to Him all snuggled up to Him, and He took 
them in His arms, and, according to the Oriental way, 
caressed them ? 

Let no man tell me that Christ was not a happy man. 
listen to the royal sentence, "Who^r the joy set before 
Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set 
down at the right hand of God." Do you not know that 



28 Christian Self-Denial. 

in sorrow are the sweetest elements of joy ? Do you not 
know that joy comes to us as the chestnut comes, the burr 
full of prickles, but in the interior, sweet and most tooth- 
some nuts ? Do you not know what heroic joy is, and that 
a man may be suffering martyrdom and yet experience a 
more exquisite joyfulness than ever could have been felt in 
any other relations ? There are joys that mock the senses, 
there are joys that lift up almost within sound of the harpings 
at heaven's gate. 

But it may be said, is not this an ingenious form of self- 
seeking ? Will not the impression be, from the tenor of such 
a discourse as this, that every one of us should go out and say, 
" Mr. Beecher says that Christian life is a very joyful life ; I 
am going to make myself happy." Oh, no ! oh, no ! This 
Christian joy is a thing to be cultivated ; it is the aim, but you 
are not fitted for it yet. A man may have joy of one sort, 
and of another, and of another ; but it is when the whole man 
is composed into a harmony in Jesus Christ that he hears those 
sounds of true joy that will not die away. We are like an 
orchestra in our life. Suppose that in an orchestra the instru- 
ments did not care for each other, every one of them striving 
to take the lead of all the rest ; suppose the piccolo should 
undertake to squeal away in <the altitudes and drown all the 
others ; or suppose that the sharp piercing clarinet should feel 
itself to be the whole music that there was in the band ; 
suppose the old wheezy bassoon should say, " No, I am here 
also ; " and suppose the tenor and the bass were at conflict 
with each other, each seeking to make itself heard and to be 
dominant; what would you think of that for music? It is 
where they are all attuned to each other in common concert 
pitch, where they all harmonise with each other, that we have 
true music. The broad ocean is a unit, and it constantly 
comes back again to unity. So it is in character. A super- 
ficial joy, a joy of the senses, a mere joy that hath in it 
neither time nor eternity, but a flash — that is not the ideal of 
Christian joy that I would hold before you ; it is that with a 
due submission of every part of your nature to harmony in 
yourself as the immediate inspiration of God. Then man is 
lifted into that state of smiling humour, mirth, imagination, 
gratification of the higher kinds. The dominant charac- 
teristic of a true Christian should be cheerfulness, radiancy, 
and joy. 



Christian Self- Denial. 29 

It may be said that in this way every man will become a 
self-seeker. Heaven help us ; every man ought to take a torch 
and go down into his basement story to hunt for himself 
among his animal appetites ; and he ought not to find himself 
there, either. Then he ought to go up another story where 
his affections are, and hunt for himself there; but the man 
does not live there. Then he carries himself up anothei story 
higher, into the range of intellectual research, but, thank God, 
he cannot find himself there. He has not found himself till 
he goes into the crystal dome, out of which he can see the 
whole heavenly host. There, in the very topmost of his being, 
where reason, where knowledge, where all self-subjection, all 
harmonious result of all the parts of his nature dwell — there 
he finds himself. Every man should be a self-seeker ; only 
look out where you search, what you search, and what you call 
yourself. 

But is not this an ingenious gloss on the sacred Scripture ? 
Is it ? Did you ever read the New Testament, more especially 
the Epistles, with the thought, I will not say of their vivacity, 
but of their immeasurable triumph ? Listen to these men that 
were like the offscouring of the earth. Paul had been banished 
from his own country, which he loved dearer than his own life, 
for he said of his countrymen, "I would to God I were 
accused from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen accord- 
ing to the flesh." Hear him recite what perils he has been 
through by sea and land, in the city, in the wilderness, among 
false brethren ; and yet you cannot find one morbid line in the 
whole of the Epistles of Paul from beginning to end. While 
he recounts shadows and midnight experiences, the morning 
star is always shining above his horizon, and he rejoices ; 
having two things fo say to the churches, the first one is 
"Rejoice," and then when he had thought a moment he found 
he had nothing better, and he added "Again I say, Rejoice." 
He did rejoice ; and there is not to be found within the bounds 
of literature such a triumphant outburst as is contained in the 
New Testament. Do you tell me that sorrow, gloom, and cir- 
cumspection are the ideal of the New Testament. It is liberty, 
it is joy unspeakable and full of glory. That is the testimony 
of the whole book. It is a book of prescriptions of medicine, 
but it is to bring men to health, and when that health appears 
in the basement, how radiant, how glorious, how all-flashing by 
night and by day, in sorrow, in woe, in bereavement ! " I 



3© Christian Self- Denial. 

would not have you, brethren, to be ignorant that they that 
sleep God shall bring with Him." He goes down to the grave 
and sounds it, and there comes heavenly melody out of it. 
He goes into the byways and dark places of life, and He 
kindles a luminous joy everywhere. Joy is not only the fruit 
and outcome of a true Christian experience, but it is the 
aim, or ought to be the aim, of every Christian man. 
O, ye that are young, feeding on husks and thinking 
that the juice is sweet, go from them ; go to the tree 
of Life ; the very leaves are wholesome, and what must 
the fruit be ? To be a Christian is to round out and per- 
fect the hints that nature has given in you ; to be a larger 
man, not a lesser one; a freer man ; for just in proportion as 
we go out of bondage by the government of our lower animal 
nature, just in that proportion we make our life to culmi- 
nate in our higher and nobler selves. There is nobody so 
free as the man that is absolutely obedient. "They are a 
law unto themselves," says the Apostle in the Epistle to 
the Galatians, where he speaks of what the fruits of the 
Spirit are. And what are they ? Love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, gentleness, goodness, self-control ; to such there 
is no law ; that is to say, they have risen so high that they 
are automatically what these things would make them by 
prescription. The New Testament, I say, is a book of 
radiant joy. 

There is a great deal of heathenism yet left in the Christian 
Church. It makes sorrow a great end and awe a great duty. 
Where a man experiences really an overwhelming sense of the 
grandeur of the Divine nature, let him bow down ; but to sit 
down every day and say to God, " Lord, Thou art glorious, 
Thou art holy, filling immensity; we praise Thee, we love 
Thee, we rejoice in Thee," as if God loved to have flattery and 
ascriptions of that sort ! When I worship anybody, I must 
have a God that is better than a man, and I cannot conceive a 
man who would like his children and his servants to come 
every day and say to him, 4i How beautiful you are, what a 
noble creature you are ! " But they do it every day till they 
have it by heart. People"praise God in the sanctuary often, not 
because they have any impulse to do it, but because it is regu- 
lation praise, and they think that God is pleased with it, and 
that in spite of the example given in the New Testament, 
where the Pharisee went up before God, and, wishing always 



Christian Self-Deniai. 31 

to be polite and obliging, said, " I thank Thee that I am not 
as this other man. You must needs have a good many men 
come before You that You don't particularly like, but I am 
not such as they." The poor publican could not even lift his 
face upwards, but he smote his breast and said, " God be 
merciful to me a sinner." Now, there is not a word of praise 
there ; but Christ says, " He went down to his house justified 
rather than the other ; I like him, I did not like the other." 
When a man wants to praise, when adoration takes on the 
form of awe, then " Praise God from whom all goodness flows," 
be free in it, but it does not follow that you are bound to say 
it every day when you do not feel it ; it is worse than wrong. 
Give the heart liberty of expression, and do not tie it up to 
the drudging usages and mechanical necessities of a formula 
and a pre-arranged religious service. The spontaneity of 
Christian hearts is sweeter to God, as much sweeter as are the 
flowers growing fresh in the field, than the memory of flowers 
in your herbarium at home. I would not cast reproach upon 
those who from heredity and from misconstruction of early 
truth are themselves what are called men of stern sobriety. A 
man may be born so unhappy that he has no sense of humour ; 
a man may have no wit or capacity to understand it ; but I 
should as soon think that a man would go about boasting that 
he was born without ears as that he should boast of being born 
without wit. He may be a respectable man, but certainly he 
ought not to boast of his deformities. I hear men set forth 
almost as ideals for imitation, images certainly, and they repre- 
sent conscience, fear, down-looking awe, but such men are not 
the ideal Christians; the ideal Christians are elastic, wide- 
winged, full of joy and the inspirations of joy to others, not 
disdaining the lowest, yet drawing joy from fountains that grow 
deeper as life goes on, and upon whom at last shall break that 
light of everlasting joy which is reserved for those who know 
how to find themselves in Jesus Christ. And I call all of you 
out of the bondage of naturalism into the higher realm of 
yourselves. I call you to sorrow so far as sorrow is a solvent 
and cleanses you. I call you to all forms of endurance and 
hardship that have in them education ; but all the way up you 
are seeking a something higher than the sorrow, the loss, the 
self-denial ; you are seeking your perfected self when the whole 
soul accords, and when the theme is everlasting glory and 
everlasting love, and every part of your nature together joins 



2,2 Christian Self-Deniac 

and cries out, or sits in silence with inexpressible joy, " Glory 
be to my Father ; I am His son, the heavens are mine, and 
the earth is mine, and time is mine, and all things are mine, 
because I am a son of God." 



THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANS BY 
THE POWER OF LOVE. 



"Neither pray I for these, &c, . . . Thou hast sent Me." 
John xvii. 20 — 23. 

THE divinity of Christ made evident through that unity 
of love which should exist in the Church, and be the 
fountain of all knowledge and of all gracious affection — that 
is my subject : the unity of Christians by the power of love. 
The commandment was : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself;" and 
this is only a varied application of that law: "As the Father 
loves Me and I love the Father, and We have unity in love, 
so may all those that I have taught, or who shall be taught 
by the words of My disciples, be one with God through love, 
and one with each other through love." And this unity lay 
very near to the heart of Jesus — much nearer than it has to 
the heart of His disciples through all the ages since. For the 
organised Church of Christ has never been in unity — never 
been in unity in any form of doctrine, of worship, of affection,, 
of the Divine Spirit. Certainly it never has been, it is not 
now, and it does not seem likely soon to become as one ; and 
most certainly it never will until we find some other method by 
which to seek it than those that have been relied upon in days 
gone by. They have been tried and have been proved to be 
vain, and if there are no others, if we must still go on the hard 
and flinty road, such as has been trod for ages, we may as 
well give up the illusion, and count love a thing dead in any 
such sense as that in which our Saviour looked upon it. An 
organised religion represented by churches, denominations, 



34 The Unity of Christians 

creeds, and ecclesiasticism lies under the imputation, among 
rational men, of narrowness, exclusiveness, selfishness, bigotry, 
quarrelsomeness, and general combativeness. And this, too, 
without derogating from the desirableness of church life, 
church organisation, and systems of truth and ordinances ; 
they are all of them, under the conditions of human life, to 
be accepted, but they have so lacked the qualifying influence 
of love as that they have been, not useless, not fruitless, but 
less fruitful and with more blighted truth and with more 
attack in leaf and blossom and fruit than was necessary in the 
garden of the Lord. Religion, as made manifest in indi- 
vidual hearts, has been most beautiful, and there alone, I 
think, unless you add to this the household, can we form any 
just judgment of what religion is to be in the days that are to 
come. Its spiritual power has never been fully developed. 
The fruit that is most beautiful and luscious in October is 
acerb and bitter in June, and religion to-day has only got as 
far as June. The infidelity of our day I believe to be an 
instrument in the hand of God, not as containing in itself 
medicable truth, but as making such war on men's infirmities in 
Christian service as shall compel them to go higher, and fortify 
themselves in the citadel of love ; and if the Church is not 
to have higher ground, and if the spirit of religion is not to 
take on a diviner form, I care not to look into the far future. 

The fruit of the Spirit ! And what if a horticultural show 
should be proclaimed, with an agricultural department, and 
the men flocking there should see neither flowers, nor fruits, 
nor vegetables, but harrows and ploughs, and reapers and 
sickles, the spade and the hoe — instruments ; and what if the 
whole contention should be which of these are the best, and 
there should be in all the stalls neither anything beautiful nor 
toothsome, but there should be wrangling and contentions as 
to the instruments by which things could be raised in the field 
and in the garden and in the orchard ? It would have very 
much the condition of the churches to-day in their higher 
forms and ceremonies — a controversy about the best methods 
of doing something instead of the thing itself done and made 
beautiful in our sight. It may please God by the activity of 
those that are without to carry into the churches a blessed 
necessity of a higher life and of a more noble and all- 
conquering spirituality. Never, I have said, and repeat, shall 
we come to that unity of the Spirit which existed between 



By the Power of Love. 35 

Jesus and His Father, and for which He prayed, as a legacy 
to all His followers in all time to come, without some other 
method. I think it may be said that the methods by which 
unity has been sought in this world are external, are mecha- 
nical, and are not even adapted to the flesh, still less to the 
Spirit, and they cannot be relied upon in days that are to come 
to produce perfect unity among Christians. 

The idea of unity is, in the first place, radically faulty ; for 
men have a sort of idea of rotund, material, physical unity 
that consists in juxtaposition, or in a certain sort of external 
harmony. Suppose the whole world agreed to one psalmody 
and to one Scripture, to one creed and to one service — to a 
unity. The midnight of this side of the globe is mid-day on 
the other side, and vice versa. You cannot get unity in the 
sense of juxtaposition. Men must be divided up for neigh- 
bourhood, for towns, villages, and cities, and different 
countries, and there is only an ideal hovering doubtfully in 
the minds of men when they speak of the unity of the 
Church — as if they were ever, in any true sense, one or united ! 
They are infinitely separated. As in one hour the revolution 
of the globe make darkness or light opposed to each other in 
alternate hemispheres, so if there should be an agreement 
to have a universal worship there would' be no unity in it. 
There might be unity in Greenwich until the sun had gone 
over and wetted its feet in the ocean and trod the further 
shore ; but by that time you would have all sung your 
hymns and said your prayers, and gone to bed here ; it 
would be only alternative worship under such circumstances. 
Yet this winged fiction of our imagination has great in- 
fluence with some. Oh, that everybody on earth could be 
saying the Lord's Prayer at once ! If you gave it wings, 
could there be such a thing ?■ Yes, provided the whole world 
were made over again — not unless. 

So, too, the repetition of the same forms, the creeds, the 
confessions, the psalmody — everything that is used by universal 
Christian worship — there can, in the necessity of the human 
structure, be no absolute unity, simply because words have 
associations as well as etymological conditions, because the 
same word means one thing to the poet and another thing to 
the orator, and another thing to the logician, and another 
thing to the philosopher and the metaphysician ; and when the 
word strikes upon the ear there is a different bell struck, and 



36 The Unity of Christians 

different men get round it. " Our Father which art in 
heaven." To me, of all the words in the world, " mother" is 
the richest, and " father " the stateliest. For my father was a 
great-hearted, magnanimous man, gentle and most generous. 
But your father was a drunkard and a thief, and all your asso- 
ciations with that name are of vice, and rudeness, and cruelty, 
and crime. You and I sit side by side in the same seat, and 
when we hear the words : " Our Father," I glow, and you 
shiver. At every step in the Lord's Prayer, that is so simple 
that it is supposed easily to unite everybody, God sees what 
is going on inside of you, and one has one thought, and another 
has another thought ; though pertaining to the same words, 
they include the associations of days gone by ; the educated 
habits, the experience of life-forces that are in you, are struck, 
and every man is like a steeple with a chime of bells, but 
every chime is different from the neighbouring chime. 

Then the words of the English language, how different they 
are, if you go back to the old Saxon English, if you go back 
to those things that our common ancestry had and transmitted 
to us. The reason why plain language is so effectual is that it 
is the language of the heart, it is the language of the table, it 
is the language of our father, of our mother, of our brothers 
and our sisters, and the sound makes ten thousand little fairies 
in every man's imagination. Periphrastic language, classical 
language, educated language, the beautiful language of the 
schools has no old associations in it, and it does not do for 
us. 

And that which is true of simple language is true of all the 
offices and exercise of the Bible. One man goes through the 
Bible and leaves one track, another man goes through the 
whole Bible on a different track, because he is different. Five 
men start upon a journey through old England. One of them 
is filled with patriotic ardour for historic verities, and he marks 
this castle and that domain. The journey is all of the past, 
that comes whispering back to him, and fills his soul with 
sweet influence. Another man is scientific, and he sees 
nothing except the chalk formation here, or the clay there, and 
the various epochs of the formation of the globe. He is 
watching for scientific and material development and growth. 
Another man is a poet, and he sees those great city trees in 
which the birds do dwell, and out of whose sounds come to 
him almost the voices of the other land ; he elorifies the trees 



By the Power of Love. 3 7 

and sees them most beautiful. Another is a botanist, watching 
for herbs in the fence and in the corners ; he scarcely sees 
trees at all. Another man is none of your men of fanati- 
cisms; he is a timber merchant, and he says: "Those trees 
will cut about so much." And so there is a different England 
to every different man that goes through it. We cannot ignore 
the fact that men understand something according to the pro- 
portional faculty, the method in which they are combined and 
have been educated, and the experiences which have gone over 
them. If this is wrong, then God is wrong, for He made it, 
and made it so that it is inevitable, and must needs 
follow the Divine decree, One evidence of divinity is variety ; 
but a grander conception is infinite variety in harmony and 
unity. 

Pause for a moment to take up one attempt that has been 
made — the most laborious, I suppose — to produce doctrinal 
unity by explanation or by brevity in generalisation. And how 
do the churches of Christendom stand to-day. Is there perfect 
unity as between the Greek Church and the Roman ? Is there 
perfect unity between our great old Roman mother and the 
Protestant offshoots? And among Protestants are there the 
same doctrinal views ? We have had controversies, we have 
had synods, we have had new creeds explaining old creeds ; 
and are all at one to-day, or anywhere near it ? We never were 
wider apart than we are to-day. Nor can you find absolute 
unity of intellectualism in regard to high moral truths ; you 
never can find it on this earth. There are certain departments 
where men may come to unity, as in arithmetic and in mathe- 
matics — that is to say, in the truths that represent materiality, 
and lie low in the base of the brain, and lie low for the service 
of the world, men can come to approximate unity. But, as 
you go up in the scale of the human heart, faculties become 
more complex, and unity and harmony among them becomes 
more and more difficult, until you come to the range that seems 
to be the peculiar element of Christianity — faith, which is only 
another word for imagination. It is reason, working by the 
mystic, and revealing and creating imagination ; it is faith when 
it is working upon the invisible and the Divine; but faith is but 
a limited expression of the universal feeling of imagination. 
And now when you consider the infinite variations of men's 
genius, the attempt to make them see all things alike in the 
higher realm is useless. You can make them see some things 



38 The Unity of Christians 

alike. One is one to everybody ; two is two to everybody ; 
three is three, ten is ten, thirty is thirty, and every com- 
bination of arithmetic when once perceived is the same. But 
you cannot take the realm of universal truth, and less and less 
in proportion as you go up, and make men see alike there. 
They are not alike. The seer differs from the seer ; and the 
very structure of man, as approved and adjudicated by the ex- 
perience of time, compels men to see love in different colours. 
Justice is justice to all. But what is justice ? And gentleness, 
and kindness, and magnanimity, and all moral qualities—there 
is a certain element in them that is common to them all ; but 
if you bring them to definition, or if you can open the thought 
portraiture of a man, and take a miniature of the way in which 
he thinks, you will find that the difference of faces would not 
be greater than is the difference of the inward workings of men 
in regard to the highest forms of truth. 

And, more than that, the higher the truth the less can 
any language be found to clothe it. You know perfectly 
well while the common things of life are ■ susceptible of 
definition or statement, that which is to you the choicest 
and the best is absolutely incapable of being interpreted 
by words. I may say love, and you may say love ; but it is 
not the same in you as it is in me — it differs in every- 
thing. But whether it differ or not, I am sorry for a 
man whose feelings can be expressed ; they must be very 
small feelings that girt round so narrowly that a word can 
compass them. The best things that are in them, all the 
sweet tendernesses, all the thoughts that a mother would say to 
the cradle, all the feelings that the heroic soul would say to its 
mate and fellow — these things can never be spoken, and if you 
attempt to speak them or define them, and turn them into idea, 
the moment the feeling is turned into an idea, and is ex- 
pressible, it is dead — the feeling is gone. This, too, from 
the very structure and necessity of the human constitution. 
Creeds have never, therefore, united churches as much as they 
have divided them. The idea of God is endlessly varied, ac- 
cording to temperament, according to education, according to 
richness of moral conception with different men. There is a 
common element about it ; but that which is common to all 
men, up and down through all their ranks, must be very 
low. The average conception of God must be comparatively 
very low, because it has got to go low enough to make itself 



By .the Fewer of Love. 39 

felt and manifested in the undeveloped. To-day the creeds 
are systematised thoughts. A system of religion that runs 
from the crown to the sandal, from the throne to the footstool 
of humanity ; a system that undertakes to bring together ki 
stated form the universal, unspeakable truths that hover round 
about the ever-living soul — such a creed as that cannot be 
formed. 

Is there to be, then, no system ? Is there to be no 
theology ? Yes. Every man is obliged to put thought and 
thought together, to follow cause and effect ; but that is no 
measure by which you can unite men together. The thing 
itself, as an imperfect statement of universal truth, must wait 
yet for more knowledge than we have got. There is coming 
up knowledge now by a new interpretation of Nature that 
never was represented in the mediaeval age, out of which came 
mostly our creeds. There is a conception of God's wonder- 
working power ; there is an evolution of the thought of time 
and its relations that was not understood ; and creeds that 
were formed for us in the mediaeval ages are like garments 
that were formed for knights — steel ; good for that age> not fit 
to be worn for every-day clothes now ; good at a time when a 
man's life depended on what he believed ; when, as in old 
England, if a man did not believe in transubstantiation — as 
now almost every man does not believe in it — when his life 
turned on it, and many precious lives were sacrificed because 
they did not believe in the absurdity — I take back the term h 
deference to those who reverently believe in it — in the impos- 
sibility of transubstantiation, or that the bread and the wind 
absolutely contain the body and blood of Jesus Christ. How 
many men have laid down their lives for not believing that ! But 
in later ages nobody believes it, except the man who has been 
trained from his childhood to a reverent acceptance of that 
which the understanding does not assent to. So, all the way 
down, orthodoxy was a man's fort, and every man had to 
pretend that he was inside that fort, or his property, or his 
reputation, or his life, or safety, or comfort, or convenience 
would be sacrificed. The persecution of days gone by related 
to a man's bodily affairs, to his life and property ; we do not 
allow anybody now to be guillotined, or hanged, or burned for 
belief; the body, at least, has got emancipation from such 
penalties ; but we torment people inside, where they are a 
good deal more sensitive than they were outside. If a man. 



40 The Unity of Christians 

does not believe as we think he ought, we treat him with 
frowns and scowls, we exclude him from society, and men are 
walking under clouds and shadows simply because they do not 
believe what somebody else does believe, but does not under- 
stand as much, or half as much, about it as the man who 
doubts. I see that some of you are laughing. I must 
admonish you not to do it, because we have the religious 
papers every day telling us that nobody has a right to laugh. 
No matter that humour and mirth are abundant in the Old 
Testament and exhorted to, they are not befitting a Christian 
congregation. Do you suppose that God put into man's 
mind faculties that are most cheering and comforting, and 
then forbids man to use them for purposes of religious eluci- 
dation ? 

A man may sleep in church — that is orthodox ; but if a man 
takes the whole scale of faculties belonging to him in his zeal 
for truth ; if, that he may pierce the leathern hide of unbelief, 
he brings to bear every element in the battery of the soul, 
these sapient and profoundly wise editors think that that is a 
desecration of Sunday in the pulpit and in the congregation. 
I hold that whatever way a man may gather men's consciences 
into his hands and their hearts into his arms, and lead them 
up into and along the sacred way, is a right way. What if 
Beethoven had been told that the middle C was an unsacred 
note in the musical scale, and that every time he came to that 
in unfolding a tune he must jump it, and give something else ? 
That would not have been more supremely ridiculous. If 
religion means awe, fear, if sobriety means dull assent, I can 
well understand that the almoners of these qualities may 
object. Still, I am told it is the custom in old England, 
although John Bunyan lived here ; that it is the custom in old 
England, although Rowland Hill preached here, to regard any 
enlightenment of the imagination, or any spontaneous out- 
break in the elucidation of truth or in the destruction of 
error, as irreverent. My God gave me myself; and I will use 
myself as He gave me to myself, and when I speak for Christ 
and for you and for your soul I must bring everything that 
God gave to my nature to bear, if by any and all means I 
may win some. It is not irreverent — it is earnest, it is real. 
I know it has power and knowledge, and I consecrate that 
power to the life of religion. Still, you had perhaps better 
follow your own habit and don't smile any more. 



By the Power of Love. 4 r 

Out of this rigorous endeavour to hold men by creeds have 
sprung sects. Under the dominance of some creed we grow ; 
and either in philosophy or science a clear-headed man sees 
that the truth has not been more than half spoken, and he 
begins to alter it. He sees that it has not been in its true 
location, and he begins to re-systematise it. The moment that 
is done the orthodox man says to him : " That is error, that is 
heresy." He says : " It is illumination, it is reformation." 
And then it is said to him : " If you indulge in that you must 
go out." " Well," he says, " I will go out ; I will be true to 
that which is revealed in me." Then he certainly goes out, 
but usually he is driven out. If he escapes anathemas he is 
fortunate. His pride is hurt, his sense of consistency is hurt. 
He then calls round about him those who believe in the same 
ways : they organise, then they are assailed, then comes bom- 
bardment between the one and the other. When they get strong 
enough, and large enough to form a separate and distinct sect 
they turn round and do just the same ; if any among them has a 
new view or a revelation they kick him out, and then is born 
another sect. The attempt to harmonise the world by rigour 
of armed doctrine has been tried over and over and over again, 
and there are to-day scarcely less than a thousand sects in the 
realm of Christianity. You talk of union — great union ! The 
old is thought to be sacred and the new dangerous, and yet 
God shows you that the old oak and the pine shed off the bark of 
last year in order to let out their clothes, and that the new bark 
carries in it the sap of life, of organisation. The old is sacred 
when it is sacred ; it is not sacred when it is not sacred. And 
the same criticisms which I make on the attempt to bring 
about a theological unity I make in regard to the attempt to 
produce unity in worship, unity in government, unity in 
ordinance. That has been attempted. I hear the Greek 
saying : " Come unto me ; our system of worship and belief is 
the only one tolerable to God." Over against them I hear 
the hoarser and louder voice of the Roman Pontiff saying : 
*•' Come unto me, for I only am inspired ; and, speaking in the 
right quarter, I am infallible.'' And I hear the Presbyterian 
Calvinist saying: "Come to us; we have got the doctrines, 
we are right, and our worship is the Scriptural one." And 
I hear the Quaker saying : " All visible organisations are 
false ; it is only the spirit that you need in worship or in 
ordinance." And they hold their tongues and do not sing 



42 The Unity of Christians 

Then I hear the Methodists roar their joyful hallelujahs : "This 
is the way to worship : this is the right way." And I hear 
above all these noises the voice of my Lord, saying : " Come 
unto Me, and I will give you rest." This contention of 
worship and ordinance and method has been going on in the 
Church in infinite diversity until, at last, the Church is like a 
broom turned upside down, split into little splinters innumer- 
able; the handle may be true, but all its diversifications are 
generally so many separations. 

Now, is there any way in which out of this Babel and con- 
fusion we can come into a true Spiritual unity ? Certainly. 
Is it merely an imaginary way ? No ; it is a way that assists, 
and has approved itself in many other directions. To-day Great 
Britain is convulsed by a great question of justice, and men 
as good as any other men are on one side, and men as good 
as any other men are on the other side : and what is the spirit 
of civilisation saying to-day? "Let every man be fully per- 
suaded in his own mind, let every man stand on his own 
convictions." We do not run out with bayonet or sword to 
pierce anybody that holds with one side or the other. There 
is liberty of opinion amongst men, and so the commonwealth 
holds together by the permission of dissent. And dissent is 
that element which prevents the boiler from blowing up ; for 
an engine which is not permitted to give vent to its steam is 
permitted very soon to explode. While men are talking and 
rating the mouth is the safety-valve of the kingdom, for when 
men have talked enough, and have been permitted to talk, 
they feel better. 

How is it in regard to the whole matter of dress ? The 
proverb has gone abroad about taste ; there is no disputing it. 
Everybody that prefers black wears black, and they that prefer 
grey wear grey ; they that prefer silk wear silk ; and they that 
choose cotton, because they can get nothing else, are permitted 
to wear cotton. Nobody is harmed in the mechanical realms, 
and matters of taste and dress, though relatively of small im- 
portance, are of some importance ; but we have learned 
to allow persons to dwell together in unity and harmony, 
dress as they please. There are certain metes and bounds 
required, but within those there is liberty. 

How is it in regard to neighbourhood ? Probably in one 
long street in your city there are not two families that keep 
house alike. You do not make sects on that account. You 



By the Power of Love. 43 

have nothing to say against your neighbour because he rises at 
six in the morning, as every good man ought, while you do not 
get up till eight or nine. The hours of slumber and of waking 
are permitted to every man as he will. Neither do men keep 
the same table, nor eat the same viands. In the whole realm 
of domestic neighbourhood there is absolute toleration of end- 
less variety. Nobody has yet risen up who undertakes to say 
that civilisation would be greatly advanced if there was an 
ordinance that everybody should go to bed and get up at the 
same hour, should breakfast at the same hour, and have just 
the same food on the same table. Would that help happiness 
and promote unity ? Is there not a toleration of every one in 
the domestic relation — a toleration of differences ? And how 
easy it is ! It harmonises society. 

But you may ask : " Would not this destroy all sects ? Is 
that your idea? " No, no ; not at ail. I would simply say: 
Let there be just as many sects as there are persons who find 
themselves edified within them. You are obliged to group 
yourselves into separate neighbourhoods ; why not let the 
grouping go forward according to elective affinities, as they are 
given to each cluster or class of men ? Sectarianism is not at 
all dangerous, and it is not forbidden. The spirit of love may 
abound just as much in a hundred divided sects as if they 
were all grouped into one. The trouble of sectarianism is that 
it is selfish, ambitious, envious, jealous. If sects behaved 
themselves there would be no harm in them. I would not for 
a single moment say to the Presbyterian : " Get another form 
of faith," nor to the Baptist, nor to the Methodist, nor to the 
Lutheran, nor to the Episcopalian. All that love these things, 
let them stay there and love them. It is perfectly possible to 
have your own separate convictions and tastes in religious life 
as in social life, and yet be perfectly in agreement with each 
other. 

It is asked : " Do you believe in abolishing creeds ? " You 
cannot do it. There is no man of any intelligence but has a 
creed of his own, either expressed or adhered to, if already 
unfolded. "What, then, would you hold?" I would hold 
simply that the fundamental things in creeds should be held 
to. Ah ! fundamental things ; yes, that is the current language 
of the pulpit; we believe in fundamentals, and things in- 
different we let go. But what do you mean by fundamentals ? 
I know what you mean ; you mean those that are fundamental 



44 The Unify of Christians 

to a given system of theology. The Calvinistic creed requires 
that there should be certain doctrines linked together, and all 
the postulates of it are called fundamental to that system ; so 
that if you but take out the shortest length of it, the chain will 
fall apart. I hold that in that sense fundamental doctrines are 
not necessary. But what do I hold as fundamental ? The 
things that are necessary to the right unfolding of the Christian 
consciousness and the right development of the whole man 
towards the Spirit of Jesus Christ — fundamental as to the un- 
folding of Christ in you, the hope of glory. Those are 
doctrines. What are they? They are few and simple: The 
doctrine that every man is born at the lowest point in life, 
and is to go up by imperfections and obscurities, which con- 
stantly break out into sin and transgression ; the doctrine, in 
other words, of the feebleness, and weakness, and sinfulness 
of every man that is born into this life — that is the foundation 
truth. We are not perfect. No one is born as himself. 
Animals are. The lion needs no education to become a 
lion ; it is a lion already. The dove is always a dove from the 
egg. But a man is not the man he was designed to be at the 
beginning, not in the cradle, not through the early years of 
childhood. Little by little he comes to himself. The law 
assumes that at twenty-one a man comes to himself — that is 
too early evidently for many a man ; but the law itself illus- 
trates the fact that a man is being born for years and years 
and years in the ascending scale of the developed faculties. In 
the beginning man is animal, and the problem of life is how to 
escape and go up to the higher and higher unfoldings of his 
own soul. There is no man born to whom it may not be said : 
" Except a man be born again he shall not see the kingdom of 
heaven. '' Where is that kingdom visible ? The interpretation 
of it is through our highest moral and reasonable faculties. 
Men go groping up, and the sentence is universal : " Except a 
man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." 

Well, can a man be born again ? Is there such a thing as 
an unfolding ? Is there an ascending tendency ? Yes. Ah ! 
then all you have to do is to let men get up as fast as they 
can. The moment a man undertakes to overcome his animal 
nature, to put down the stringent passions and appetites, he 
feels, as society beats and throbs, the biases, the attractions, 
all the actions and retro-actions that are going on. At last he 
gasps and says: "I cannot, I cannot." For men seeking a 



By the Power of Love. 45 

higher realm are like shipwrecked mariners that have swum 
from their ship till their strength is exhausted, and are 
beginning to touch the bottom, and creep up along the shore, 
till some great overtopping wave comes in after them, and 
they are swept back again, struggling, into the sea. Then 
comes the blessed annunciation that God is everywhere. The 
Spirit of God is that Spirit by which universal growth takes 
place ; and there is the power of God given forth to every 
soul that wants it, and opens itself to it, to be regenerated by 
the power of the Holy Ghost. It is not a hard command 
that we should not be converted in any other way than that ; 
it is a most gracious permission, it is a glorious annunciation. 
In your struggle upward God is on your side, working out 
your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that 
is working in you to will and to do of His good pleasure. 
Glory be to God that a man be converted and that he has 
Divine help ' 

Then, besides this, comes the annunciation that as we are 
ascending we shall come to that state in which we shall under- 
stand, with a personal and intimate experience, Jesus ; that He 
is the interpretation to every man that believes in Him of 
God's atonement; that He is the revelation of the Divine 
Nature which is in itself atonement ; that in God there is all 
that is necessary to make away with past transgression ; and 
that Divine love washes clean and sets every man in a right 
state ; bears with him, endures him, carries him onward and 
forward, until at last he reaches the perfected state. 

Then there is the great truth of immortality. The sinfulness 
of man, the need of the new birth, the regenerating power of 
the gracious will of God helping him, the life that is to come, 
the atoning power of God, the lifting of man out of the low to 
the high, out of the sinful to the pure — these are fundamental 
to the development of Christian experience and Christian 
character. But when you come to fore-ordination, election, 
and I know not what else, I do not say that they are not true, 
I merely say that the exposition of them is fundamental to a 
system of theology, but not fundamental to Christian expe- 
rience. 

But men may say : " Are not these doctrines of grace, as 
they are called, sound doctrines ?" (largely because they make 
so much sound) " and will not they be shattered and taken 
away?" No; those that feel a call for them, those that have 



46 The Unity of Christians 

been found by them, those in whose inner consciousness these 
things throb and bear fruit — there is no reason why they should 
not believe in them. If we were to purge out everything in us 
that is imperfect in our belief we should hardly cast a shadow. 
Paul says that our whole belief in this life is a mere fragmentary 
thing. " Knowledge shall vanish away, prophecy shall cease." 
What is it to be immortal? Faith, hope, love, disposition. 
This world is only one corner of the universe, and the system 
of God is multifold ; it cannot be understood until you see all 
its relations to all eternity and to all gradations of being. At 
death all things will seem so different ; it will seem as if our 
firmest beliefs had no existence. Looking at a mosaic while a 
man is making it, the eye gets up as far, perhaps, as the feet of 
an apostle, and stops there. Who can tell what the stately form 
of the apostle yet to be developed will be ? It is true, as far 
as it goes ; but it does not go far enough to get the full stature 
and the expression. We scarcely reach in the spiritual life even 
to the feet of the grandeur of that Being for whom we live and 
in whom we live, and whom we are to understand only when 
we behold Him as He is. Therefore, I hear John himself cry- 
ing out : " We are the sons of God ; but it does not yet appear 
what we shall be.'' We know that we are sons; but what sons 
are doth not yet appear. 

Again, it may be asked : Is there any hope for the future ? 
Blessed be God, much. <J The night is far spent, the day is at 
hand." Not in the ways that we have marked out is this 
higher notion of the kingdom of God being developed. To-day 
the principle of sympathy is opening all hearts. No nation is so 
separate from other nations but that their weal and their welfare 
interest men. The missions that are at work from the Church of 
England in India are my missions ; the Baptist missions in India 
are mine, for that in them that makes Christ for my fellow-men 
makes Christ for me, and we are brethren. The principle of 
elective affinity is giving place to something that is yet higher 
than that, without excluding and destroying that entirely. 
Men are coming nearer together. The work is slow, but it is 
going on. There is more relation between church and church, 
between denomination and denomination. They are working 
for the temperance cause ; they are working for the cause of 
peace ; they are working for a larger humanity in the admini- 
stration of public trusts ; they are working together, and that 
close corporation of the Church which held them in iron 



By the Power of Love. 47 

bars, so that they could not go out or in respectively, is giving 
way to this spirit that is descending upon the Church. Some 
of the sweetest saints that ever lived were Roman Catholics, 
thank God ! and some of the sweetest friends I have to-day 
are Catholic priests. I love them and will love them, even if 
they should not love me. They are my brethren, though they 
may not know it ; they cannot separate me from them. I am 
a Calvinist — all except the doctrine. I am an Arminian — all 
except the doctrine ; I am a Unitarian ; lama Universalist ; 
I am a Swedenborgian ; I am a Lutheran — I am everything, 
since everything that is worth having is love, and I love the 
whole of them. In the things in which they touch Jesus, I 
touch Him, and in Him is our unity. We are beginning to 
recognise that Divine unity, and are coming nearer and nearer 
together. It is not, therefore, to relax the organisation, it is 
not to destroy all creeds, but it is to make higher than any 
and all of them that spirit of Jesus Christ which does not 
divide and scatter men, but which draws all men together in a 
Divine atmosphere and in a Divine perfection. 

Now, brethren, we have tried all these things, we have tried 
to make the Church strong by dividing it. We have tried to 
make men love one another by pounding them and slaying 
them ; but somehow or other we never have done it. Is it 
not worth our while to come out of the realm of fear and of 
abject conscience ; is it not worth while to rise above talking 
about absolute truth, and absolute justice, and absolute recti- 
tude ? These things are all very well in their way, but is there 
nothing higher ? Is there not a divine atmosphere of love 
that shall become, as I had almost said, universal, no longer 
sporadic, when all the churches of every denomination shall 
break out into new and spring-like fragrance and blossoms of 
love in Jesus Christ ; not one patriarch, not one single church, 
but one divine atmosphere is wafted from one church to 
another when it is the spirit of Christendom, and love at last, 
long hampered, and chained and abused, shall come to her 
regency, and walk forth as God's own elect ? Then there will 
be more power in the atmosphere, more power in the churches, 
more power in religion, that no infidelity will want to touch, 
for the things that constitute true religion, love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, self-control — -who hath a 
word to say against them ? Who is infidel to these things ? 
And when these qualities, that are the fruit of the Spirit, shall 



48 The Unity of Christians by the Power of Love. 

be the characteristic and not the exceptional development of 
the Christian Church, you shall have come upon a new day ; 
the power of the Lord will sweep over the earth, as after 
winter and long-delayed spring, the balmy days come, when 
the birds sing again, and the flowers scent the earth and fill 
the air with fragrance, and the summer is come, and the 
harvest is ripe. Oh! for that day! But all that you and I 
can do is, each of us in his own place, in his own personality, 
and in his own church, to stand for the spirit of love, to refuse 
to be provoked and alienated, to stand in the meekness and 
sweetness of Jesus, and to say to others what He says to us : 
" All ye that labour and are heavy laden, come unto Me, and 
I will give you rest ; take My yoke upon you ; My yoke is 
easy — the yoke of life— and My burden is light, and ye shall 
find rest unto your souls.'' 



NICODEMUS AND THE RE-BIRTH- 



"Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, 
Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." — 
John iii. 3. 

THERE have been a great many men that have suffered 
in their reputations through long periods of history, and 
who have been put right again by later investigations ; but no 
man ever was more misrepresented, no man was so little under- 
stood, as Nicodemus. Most persons connect with the declara- 
tion that he came to Jesus by night that other unlucky sentence 
so far as applied to him, "for fear of the Jews." But that was 
another person ; that was a secret Christian, " for fear of the 
Jews," and not Nicodemus. But he came to Jesus by night,. 
as if any other time were half so fit for what he wanted as the 
silence of the twilight and the earlier hours of darkness. The* 
extraordinary imputation laid upon him of being a timid' 
believer is absolutely void of truth. So far from it, if I were 
to pick out a man of rare endowment, of great delicacy and 
great fervour and great fidelity to his own convictions, that man 
should be Nicodemus. Let us look a little into this history 
and see the scene in John vii. " Then came the officers to- 
the chief priests and Pharisees ; and they said unto them, Why- 
have ye not brought Him? The officers answered, Never 
man spake like this Man. Then answered them the Pharisees, 
Are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the 
Pharisees believed on Him ? But this people who knoweth 
not the law are cursed." That is, they cursed them. " Nico- 
demus saith unto them (he that came to Jesus by night, being 
one of them) " — a member of the Sanhedrim, a ruler standing 
high in office among the orthodox Jews — "Doth our law 
judge any man before it hear him, and know what he doeth? 
They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee ? 

d 



5<d Nicodemus and the Re- Birth. 

Search, and look : for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet. And 
every man went unto his own house." 

Now, there are a great many worthy men that are true to 
themselves, but it is a great trial of a man's manhood if he is 
publicly true to his sentiments and faith in the presence of 
social influences adverse to him. He is a brave man in 
political affairs who thinks that his party is wrong, takes some 
fiery moments of zeal when they are about to precipitate them- 
selves into wrong courses, and says : " I rebuke you ; I will 
have none of this," and the parties make it the key-note of 
their campaign, and everything depends on it, and he stands 
against them and says : " I will not." There are very few 
men — I never have known one — that dared do it, even among 
men of honest conviction, and who are true to their convictions 
in themselves. Or in the convention, conference, or convoca- 
tion, a clergyman, some man, is for trial for heresy putative ; 
and there are not a few — a score or more — that believe that 
he is on the right lines of discovering new truth ; but there is 
the esprit de corps, the orthodox feeling that they must take 
care of God in this world, and listening there are a score of 
men that believe with the impleaded one, and not one that 
dares risk his reputation for orthodoxy by standing up and 
saying : " Men, brethren, and fathers, ye do wrong ; I believe 
as he believes, and if you touch him cut me off." No ; every 
man is bound to take care of his influence ; men are afraid 
that their influence will be taken away from them, and it had 
better be if it is a sort of influence that anybody can take 
away. A man's influence is the reflex of power, and when a 
man's influence can be taken away, and yet he be alive, it 
ought to be taken away ; it is a false shadow. Yet here was 
this man, in the inflamed state of public feeling and in the in- 
flamed condition of the Sanhedrim, when Christ had already 
been condemned by them in secret council, and they were 
seeking to seize Him, and carry out the sentence clandestinely 
to slay Him, and were so wrought up to that purpose that they 
swore at the people because they were so ignorant — in the 
midst of the serried ranks, Nicodemus quietly rose and took 
His side, and said : " Doth our law judge any man before it 
hear him, and know what he doeth ? " and sneers and taunts 
were let out like hissing, venomous serpents. Rather a pecu- 
liar condition for a coward ! 

Then there is another remarkable case, which is contained 
in the nineteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, verse thirty- 



Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 51 

eight. It follows the crucifixion; Christ was dead. "And 
after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus Christ, 
secretly, for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might 
take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him leave. He 
came, therefore, and took the body of Jesus. And there came, 
also, Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and 
brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound 
weight. Then took they the body of Jesus and bound it in 
linen clothes, with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to 
bury/' When a man has been in favour of some movement 
or some man, and the cause collapses, and the man has gone 
into disgrace — when the bubble is burst, and there is no use 
any longer in risking one's safety or convenience by public 
adhesion to the offending man, how many are there that would 
stand up and say : " He seems to have come to naught, but I 
believe in him still, and I believe in the cause, and, if need be, 
I will perish with it " ? But Nicodemus, when there was 
nothing more to be gained, when the whole drama had been 
enacted, and the pall of death and apparent night had come 
down en the prospect of this strange Redeemer, he would not 
give Him up w T hen He was dead, and he exposed himself to the 
inspection and to the dangers that came by taking the body and 
giving it honourable burial with all the accustomed rites and 
honour belonging to the Jews. This is the man we call the 
timid Nicodemus. What did he come by night for ? Well, 
when would you have him come if he wanted to have a quiet 
conversation ? In the roar of the temple ? Would you have 
had him come when all was bustle and confusion, and every- 
body was asking questions, and some were trying to trap Jesus, 
and others were frivolous or ignorant ? Was that the time for 
a deep-hearted man to burrow into the very inner consciousness 
of Christ, and know the truth ? If a man had inward doubts, 
inward longings, inward aspirations, if he longed for the truth, 
and had long been hungering for it, and there came the 
man that seemed to have the power to span the heaven above 
him and to give him the things which his heart desired above 
everything on earth, treasure, reputation, standing, everything 
— if there was such a man as that, what would you say, honest 
man ? What would I say ? " Give me the chance when I 
may have this talk with him alone, that I may open my whole 
soul to him and learn more of his way " 

It is said that when Emerson visited London and sought out 
Carlyle, they two sat by themselves for more than two hours 



52 Nicodemus and the Re- Birth. 

in the evening in a darkened room, and the chief part of the 
conversation was God and Immortality. These great thinkers 
who had had their doubts and their perplexities longed to 
sound each other and know what way each had made along 
that great highway of God. Was it because they were cowards 
that they sought leisure and seclusion for mutual investigation ? 

Then there is one thing more, and it is rather a striking 
thing, too. Matthew, Mark, and Luke make little or no men- 
tion of Nicodemus — if my recollection serves me, none at all. 
John, that peculiar disciple, John, all whose affinities were of 
the spiritual life, of the deepest inward life, is the only one who 
brings up this history of Nicodemus. He saw and felt just 
what Nicodemus was, and he makes a record of it. 

Now, what has all this to do ? It is interesting as biography, 
as mere history — it is instructively very interesting indeed ; it is 
profoundly interesting when we come to think that this man 
stood apart from his fellow-men by qualities of virtue and 
excellence. We should not have been surprised if, pointing 
to the rabble in Jerusalem, raging, rancorous, Christ had said : 
" They must be born again." Of course they must. Robbers 
ought to be born again, thieves ought to be born again, drunk- 
ards ought to be born again, lecherous folk ought to be born 
again. Everybody would agree that there ought to be con- 
version of some folk ; yes, if a man had a very imperfect and 
fitful life, flashing to day, in gloom to-morrow, men would say : 
" Yes, it might be better for such a man to be born again.' 7 
But here was the luminous Jew, a leader, a ruler, eminent in 
the Sanhedrim, and coming to Christ, showing hunger and 
desire for a higher and a nobler life, and it is to him Christ 
says :' " You must be born again, or you shall not see the king- 
dom of God." 

Could there have been anything more striking than that this 
annunciation should be made to a man that might be con- 
sidered in morality and in religion, for his time and knowledge, 
a pattern man ? If it were true of Nicodemus, where is the 
man of whom it is not true, " Ye must be born again " ? 

Then it is worth our while, before passing to the meaning of 
Christ, to call attention to the incidental fact that Christ never 
preached this in any of His other sermons. Take the Sermon 
on the Mount— this doctrine is not announced there. It is 
said, to be sure, and that is the nearest of anything that comes 
to it, " Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter in." 



Nicodemus and the Re- Birth. 53 

But here is this fundamental declaration of a re-birth, a new- 
birth, a conversion, a total conversion of a man. And when 
you go to Paul's sermon you do not hear that doctrine 
preached as it is now in our churches. The doctrine of re- 
generation, the new birth, conversion, is one of the staple 
fundamental doctdnes of our pulpit warfare ; it is one of the 
executive doctrines of the Bible. Yet when you come to look 
at the sermons that were preached by our Saviour and His 
Apostles, this technical form of it is not to be found, although 
that which they teach runs in it by construction and upon reflec- 
tion and philosophical analysis. 

To the popular mind there was another mode of instruction, 
but to this man, Nicodemus — capable as it should have seemed 
of understanding the fulness of Christ — there was taught the 
doctrine which throws light upon Christ's innermost thought in 
regard to this whole doctrine of conversion, regeneration, new 
birth. The kingdom of God is said to be within you. It is a 
view that Christ gives of what to Him in His inward life and 
thought is meant by the Kingdom of God. Not a condition for 
future salvation, the safety after death, is this doctrine of con- 
version. It is the indispensable condition of that kingdom 
which is on earth and in men now, and it relates not to a 
formal kingdom, but a state ; it relates to a condition of a man's 
soul. You shall not come into that experience of your soul 
which is God's kingdom, and where only you can understand 
Him, meet Him, feel Him, unless you are born again ; you 
cannot come into that higher stage of your own self where only 
you can meet and understand in some shadowy w r ay your God. 
It is a view of unfolded mind that Christ is giving here, that 
condition in which a pure spirituality dominates all inferior gra- 
dations of experience, good or bad or indifferent as they may 
be ; it is not an insight, a flash such as one has in a hymn, or 
such as one feels in moments of transcendent love and gladness ; 
it is not a flash, it is when the work has been carried on in the 
womb of a man's own brain by which at last he comes up to 
his real self, to the real man that God meant in the primal 
creation, and when the problem is the ascension from low and 
coarse matter up through the various stages of unfolding, up to 
that that God meant when He created man in His own image, 
the higher man, in which love and conscience and will and 
reason so predominate not as to obliterate any powers that are 
below, but as to bold them in harmony and perfect sympathy 
with them and in perfect subjection to your higher self. 



54 Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 

That is God's kingdom as I understand it in the souls of 
men. 

In view, then, of this interpretation, " Except a man be born 
again," and I might, without any want of reverence, say a good 
many times, too — " Except a man be born again he shall not 
see the kingdom of God," he shall not come up into 
that element, attribute, and condition in himself which 
is the kingdom of God in you, and in which you meet 
God and understand Him, not by learning, not by 
logic, not by philosophy, but — I had almost said by spiritual 
sensation — if the terms were not contradictory. " Blessed 
are the pure in heart, they shall see God." No man ever 
excogitated God ; no man ever came to Him by philosophical 
analysis. If any man has come to the realisation of God, it is 
heart that has done it ; it is out of feelings in men that are so 
nearly like God's own attributes and emotions as that we feel 
Him. It is moral intuition that teaches us of God in His 
reality and in His higher reign. In view of this interpretation 
of the inwardness of God's kingdom in man and of the 
necessity of being brought up to it by new regeneration — 
born first as an animal, you have got to be born again as a 
social creature, you have got to be born again as a moral 
creature under the dominion of right and wrong ; born into 
morality, you have got to be born again to come into faith,, 
life, spirit-life, the highest life. You may call it all compre- 
hensibly born again, but in historic fact it takes place time 
by time, stage by stage, until the whole golden chain is com- 
pleted, the links are wrought out one by one in actual Christian 
experience. 

Now we are prepared to look at some practical questions 
that naturally will flow out of this subject. First, we will look 
at that delusion that conversion is an all-accomplishing act. If 
you take the actual mechanical way of preaching of good men 
and imperfect, though it is a way that has done great good, 
although it has not represented the innermost and full form of 
the truth, yet, as I heard my venerable father say : " First we 
preach that we may get attention ; then we preach to the 
attention of the audience that we may get up interest ; and 
then, when we have secured interest, we preach that we may 
produce conviction of sin ; and when we have produced con- 
viction of sin, then comes the tug of war ; then comes the 
will of man in conflict with the will of God ; then comes the 
subjugation of hatred to God and of hatred to the law of 



Nicodemus and the Re- Birth. 55 

holiness ; then after the struggle has been gone through, and 
the man is either exhausted or is subdued, and gives up, then 
comes conversion, and after this practical method is the ex- 
perience of thousands of people, who say : ' I was going on in 
a course of sinfulness and worldliness till the law came, sin 
revived, and I died,' " and they explain that on some great 
occasion, under some mighty movement of revival, or under 
some sudden revelation of the truth of man's nature and need, 
" I was seized with conviction of sin ; I wrestled with it ; I 
tried to get some peace from it ; none came ; my night and 
my noonday were of the like colour, and often I fought and 
would not submit, and was driven from point to point by the 
terror of the law of God — the law work had become perfect in 
me ; then at last it pleased God to reveal His Saviour to me 
— Jesus Christ — and I gave up, and oh, there was a new heaven 
and anew earth; I never heard the birds sing till then ; I 
went home, and my wife's face was like an angel's to me ; I 
never loved my children as I did then ; I was converted ! I 
was converted ! I was converted ! " It is all very true, but a 
very imperfect and partial statement of what is the root and 
substance and philosophy of any such experiences. This is 
mechanical : it divides up the work by stages and steps which 
are taken ; but the same result might have come without having 
taken these successive steps in this mechanical order. For 
all this impression in respect of the men is founded on the idea 
that conversion is the irresistible force of God's will, cutting, 
like a scythe, everything before it, blasting like the lightning, 
sweeping a man down as if he were but a bulrush before a 
tornado, and it is based upon the idea that in the act of con- 
version it is not a Divine, educating force that is carrying men 
along, but a Divine, spiritual omnipotence, and then men say : 
"When God has done a thing nobody can undo it; He ties 
the knot of allegiance, and nobody can pick it apart again, and 
there is no sword that can cut the Gordian knot," and men 
feel that, having been converted, it will stand, and that it is a 
thing set, done, and for ever. And so we find in men, although 
they go back to a worldly way, and are just as selfish as they 
used to be, and just as prone as they used to be to avarice, 
and are ambitious, and are proud, yet in various ways, once in 
a year or two, when there is rousing in the church, they cry 
a little, read their Bibles a little more, pray a little, get back 
to their hope. They have got a hope, and they think that is a 
fortress. "Because I have evidence that I was convicted I 



56 Nicodemus and the Re-Bitth. 

have evidence that I was converted, and God's irresistible will 
is not to be negated by any lapses and fallings off on my part ; 
it brings me up again. Yes, I am a converted man ■ I have 
been born again. That stands." Now, I hold that when a 
man has really been converted he will stand. I do not believe 
he will stand because it is necessary to carry out a certain 
system of theology that you must assert the irresistibleness of 
the Divine will in such a case as that, but I believe God is 
giving new birth to us as He is to all nature all the time, and 
that it is the result of the Divine will, but not in the mechanical 
way, not with that irresistibleness. I believe it is the result of 
the Divine will just as heat in the sun is the irresistible cause 
of moss, and grass, and flowers, and shrubs, of grapes and 
fruit of every kind. No tree can stand up and say : " I made 
myself a pippin." He is not going to nod his proud head as 
if he did it himself. He had the element in him out of which 
the tree came and the fruit came, but all came from the sun, 
and if there had been an eclipse he would never have sprouted, 
let alone become the father of fruit, and I believe no man in 
life ever thinks, wills, or has any upward aspiration, or any 
longings, any soul-life, that God is not the author of " In Him 
we live and move and have our being ; " and while no man 
can live in his physical and animal nature except by the agency 
of the laws of matter and of the world around him, still more 
imperatively is that to be asserted as true when you come not 
to the animal man, but to the spiritual man, the higher man- 
hood, the man of the spirit, and not of the flesh; all the 
impulses of his life, everything that he has, "By the grace of 
God I am what I am." It is the circumambient influence, the 
universal, immanent God, the God everywhere and always, and 
in all things; that is the pabulum of life, is the spiritual 
stimulus by which we do anything that is higher than animal 
life itself. 

Then there is the idea that conversion is like an insurance 
policy. " I paid the insurance premium ; I have got the name 
down ; I am insured against future fire; you cannot disturb 
me." There are many men that hold conversion like an 
insurance policy against future fire, or like a deed that covers 
property. " I paid the price, I have gone through all the legal 
forms ; here is my deed, and the law will defend me in that 
position." Men have an impression that having been through 
certain spiritual experiences they have a deed, and what sort 
cf Christians these notions make ! 



Nicoiemus and the Re-Birth. 57 

There is an impression, too, that conversion, or that being 
born again, is instantaneous, and very much emphasis is put 
upon that. Now, in one sense, it is true that in the last analysis 
every act of will is instantaneous. All the sequences are not, 
and all the antecedent preparations are not. When you put a 
thing weighing ten pounds in that scale, and commence and 
put five pounds in the other scale, it does not vibrate : you add 
four more, and it begins to vibrate a little, but still the ten 
pounds weigh down the nine pounds, and the nine pounds and 
a half, and the nine pounds and three-quarters, and by-and-by 
you come so that it looks as though a needle's difference 
would make it, and the needle is thrown in, and it kicks the 
balance, and down it goes, outweighing — instantaneous when 
it comes to the exact point. A man is going North, thinking 
he is coming South, and by-and-by he is roused by some 
phenomenon, by some guide, and he says : " Have I been all 
this time going wrong, have I been going North ? Well, I 
have got to turn round.'' The turning round is instantaneous, 
but the getting back to where he started from is not. And so 
there may be in the course of a man's experience many, many 
losses, many sorrows, many joys, much instruction, and it does 
not vibrate his will to the right direction. Little by little they 
increase in number and in force, and he finds himself drawing 
nearer and nearer to the point of decision, and at that very 
point is the critical point. Whether you go for a lawful pleasure 
or not will determine whether you go right ; whether you go 
to a thing permissible, in parties, or not, will often determine. 
At these moments — these crises in a man's history — whose 
results reach as far as eternity itself, the least things will deter- 
mine the action of a man's will, and it is instantaneous at 
that point of choice ; but when a man chooses that which in its 
nature has succession, unfolding, development in it, it cannot 
all take place instantaneously. God never did regenerate 
any man, so far as we have knowledge of it, without there 
being a long process of sanctification afterwards to bring the 
man up to the full measure of a child of God. We call them 
by different names, but sanctification is only a part of con- 
version with another name on it. While, therefore, conver- 
sion, in one interior and philosophical sense, may be said to 
be instantaneous, yet it involves in its very nature continuity, 
gradualism, unfolding, unfolding, unfolding, from the beginning 
ilear through to the end. 
Take the Prodigal Son. He went away to spend his sub- 



58 Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 

stance in riotous living, and began to be kicked out of society ; 
one contumely followed after another, until at last, he, a Jew, 
that hated hogs as much as moderns love them, went into the 
field to feed them, and among them he got so bad that he 
made himself level with them, and ate their swill, their pods 
and husks. And then memory began to come. Sometimes 
fasting does do a man good who has been a fast and riotous 
liver; it emancipates him from the juices and morbidity of 
enormous digestion. A man ought to live so that he does not 
want to fast ; if men lived in a good healthy state of body they 
would not need to fast. It is for the riotous liver that fasting 
is good for anything, and when this man had got reduced in 
his body he began to think, and he says : " How many hired 
servants hath my father that have bread enough and to spare, 
and I am perishing with hunger?" Those thoughts kept going 
on, and urging him and urging him, till, by-and-by, from his 
low- stooping among the swine, he lifted himself up and said : 
" I will arise; I will go to my father." There is the work — 
it is begun ; but there are a great many weary steps before he 
got there — a great many; but the regenerating point in his 
life was when he came to the decision that he would do it, and 
followed it up. His reception we all know ; I think it is one 
of the most extraordinary developments of Divine love and 
mercy that has ever come — that of the father receiving his son 
back from his follies and dissipations, and not only receiving 
him back, but shutting his mouth, not letting him make even 
his confession, but when he saw him afar off running to him — ■ 
running to him, throwing himself upon his neck, and kissing 
him. He did not say: "Have you come back staid? Are 
you reformed ? " Nothing of the sort — not a word. Love 
sweeps everything out of the way, and forgives because it is 
love. And love on earth is as dry husks compared with the 
glory of the ever-living and ever-growing love of God. Love 
is atonement, and God is love. 

Many men have an impression that conversion is not only 
instantaneous and historically fixed, but that it implies also an 
absolute physical re-creation of the man. They think that 
that which was old in sinning was taken out of him and some- 
thing new put into him. Here is an old clock ; it has been 
ticking away and lying about the hours for ever so many days. 
At last we send for a Frenchman to come. He has a well- 
made French clock ; he unscrews it, and takes out the works, 
and puts them into the old clock, and then it begins to go. 



Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 59 

So many a man thinks that the old man was knocked out of 
him and the new man put into him, and he goes on ticking, 
and thinks he is keeping time just because of this wonderful 
change. No such change takes place ; it is not a change of 
organ, it is a change of function, that takes place in conversion, 
and they that have done evil learn to do well. 

Then there are a great many persons who are distressed 
because that which they hear in others' experience is nothing 
in theirs. They have heard a class leader or a good Presby- 
terian Christian or a Baptist convert get up in a meeting and 
give his experience. Now, there never will be two experiences 
exactly alike until you get two men exactly alike. The expe- 
rience that we try to get is absurd. We are all of us like 
dramatic artists. Mr. Irving is not Hamlet; he plays Hamlet, 
though. Mr. Irving is not Othello, but he plays Othello — ■ 
imitates him ; and we are all trying to be Hamlets or Othellos 
or somebody-elses. In other words, we are all the time trying 
to compare our experience with somebody else's we heard in 
the meeting, even if it were not doubtful whether they had 
such experiences, because people, when giving their experiences, 
are always the heroes of them themselves. Here is one says : 
"Our brother threw me into darkness last time. Did you 
hear what he said ? ' The law of God,' he said, ' filled the 
heaven with blackness' ; I never saw any blackness. And ' it 
thundered long and loud ' ; I never heard any thunder. ' And 
I was awfully wretched. I could not eat nor sleep ; ' I never 
had any trouble about that myself. And, finally, he said he 
had such a burst of joy that it seemed a new heaven and a 
new earth ; I never did, and I have great doubt whether I 
have been converted." 

Now, suppose a party of men out on a holiday ; the boat is 
capsized on a lake, and one gets out one way for the shore, 
and the other another way, and one fortunately strikes shallow 
water immediately and wades ashore. He is wet to be sure, 
but that is all. He gets on the ground and shakes himself,. 
and thanks God he is saved. Another man gets among the 
lily pads and the eel grass, and is slimed all over with filth, and 
has to come down the mouth of the estuary, and when he gets 
on shore he is all dirty and smeared from head to foot, and he 
comes to the other and says: "Are you saved"? "Yes, I 
am." M Well," says the other, " look at me ; I have not got 
any mud on me; I do not believe I am saved." These pro- 
cesses through which the mind changes its states and relations, 



6o Nicodemns and the Re-Birth. 

have personal interest, but they do not determine at all the 
personal condition of a man. He that has come under the 
controlling influence of love to God and to man, and feels it 
every day, need not disturb himself and trouble his conscience 
as to how he got there. If he is there he is there. Do not 
you believe that the sun rises ? You saw it yesterday morning 
come up over the horizon clear and radiant from the moment 
it struck the atmosphere. To-morrow it comes up under a 
cloud ; it is noonday before you see the sun, but the sun rose 
then. And the Sun of Righteousness rises to some behind 
clouds, but to others in a clear sky ; it rises if the fruits of 
righteousness are developed in the conscience and the life. 

Well, the idea that some, by reason of natural excellence 
and the careful training they have had, do not need con- 
version may be illustrated and the folly of it exposed 
according to the view which we have taken this morning. 
Now, Christianity has so far prevailed in this world that in 
Christian households the Gospel is preached by father and 
mother, not catechetically it may be, but better a thousand 
times by their living, by their example, and the child grows 
up under a perpetual knowledge of the Gospel, and his 
nurture and admonition have been in the Lord, and he is 
brought to a state having hereditary qualities, which are 
God's reward for the righteousness of his ancestors to the 
third and fourth generation, inheriting a balanced mentality, 
and having a perpetual church in the family, and a Gospel 
preached, and he trained to all the outward forms. It does 
not require any such work with him as with a man born of 
Ignominious parents, brought up in the midst of jeers, irreli- 
gious, and all forms of vice and crime. That man has a 
longer distance to travel than the other has. But no matter 
how high a man has travelled in the family relations, and how 
high the work of morality has been in him, there is an element 
of development to go on yet in him. There is not any man 
that has reached those higher tones; there is not any man 
who has the whole organ in him ; and the sweetest creature 
that ever touched the earth, as a bird touches the quivering 
limb and flies again into the ether, the heart most nearly 
responsive to everything organically beautiful, nevertheless 
must have an unfolding yet — there is something higher and 
beyond yet. No man ever comes into a state of absolute 
communion with God. We come into the state of begging. 
Two-thirds of all men's prayers are begging — begging for 



Nicodemus and the Re- Birth. 61 

something. No man ever comes into that state in which he 
stands in the presence of God blessed. " No matter whether 
I have anything or not, it is enough for me ; God is my God, 
and I am His, and I can feel Him and rejoice in Him." No 
person ever comes to that state without an unfolding process 
in him. Happy are they that are advanced a good way on 
the road towards that ; but no one is ever so far advanced that 
there is not to be this special unfolding by the inshining of 
the Holy Ghost into his heart and into his experience. 

There is reason to fear that many professing Christians, I 
remark once more, are trusting to old hopes and not to the life 
that is in them, and not to the progress of that life that 
is in them. There are a great many Christians that do 
not bring forth the fruits of righteousness, and the utmost 
charity trembles for them. They are confident. They make 
me think of a man that has bought his orchard trees, and set 
them out, and after they have grown a little in the first heat 
of the soil, the soil gives out, and they give out, and the trees 
are covered with scale, and they grow mossy, and insects 
burrow in them, and there is no fruit except here and there a 
small knurly apple that is worse if you touch it than if you 
let it alone ; and when sometimes his attention is called to the 
condition of the orchard, he goes and gets the label of each 
tree and reads it, "Holland Pippin" — "Ah, Holland Pippin." 
He goes and gets his catalogue. " I bought it of Waterer ; I 
bought it of this nurseryman, an established nurseryman, a 
good nurseryman; he is orthodox; it is true; it is all right." 
It does not bring much fruit forth ; what then ? How many 
Christians are there like trees and vines that bring forth no 
fruit ? " When I came to seek the fruit there was none," 
saith the lord of the vineyard. Are there no such Christians 
here ? Are there no Christians here the forces of whose real 
life is in the world, in the body ? Are there not many men 
here that never hear the sweet, seraphic music from heaven ? 
Are there not those here that could not say conscientiously, 
" Thou knowest, Lord, that I love Thee " ? I tell you that a 
true and high Christian experience is just as clearly to be 
discerned as the ringing of the bell in the marriage festival 
itself. A man does not know whether he is a Christian or 
not ; it is because he has been misled by doctrine. But no 
man ever ought to be in any doubt who believes that God 
loves us not only while we are sinners, but because we are 
sinners. What does the doctor care about you across the 



62 Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 

street till you get sick? Then he cares for you, then he 
comes to heal you. And God cares for us not because we 
are so lovely, but because we are so homely ; not because 
we are serving Him so well, but because we are serving Him 
so poorly; not because we are righteous, but because we are 
wicked, inharmonious with ourselves, not in harmony with life 
round about us, and far from being in harmony with God and 
the universe ; and His heart is poured out in sorrow for us 
because we are so low, so weak, so deserving of condemna- 
tion. Do you believe that ? Do you believe that it is by the 
grace of God that you are what you are — a Christian at every 
single step — and that God still lives, and that the drawing you 
feel, the reluctance, the regret at anything wrong is a part of 
God's standing, stimulating soul acting on your soul ? Why 
should you be in doubt, then? Do you believe there is in 
you even the least aspiration, and that, though you make 
many mistakes and stumbles, yet you lift yourself up again, 
and strive to love and please Him ; and is God your God, and, 
therefore, your hope of salvation ? Then you do not need to 
be in doubt. Do not suppose that that man is a Christian 
that has a poetic and dramatic experience, and you are not 
one because you have only a drudging journey which, with 
muddy shoes, you are seeking to perform. When a man is on 
the road, and slips up or falls down, he does not turn round, 
and go home saying ; "I will not journey; " he plucks himself 
up, and shakes his garments, and goes on. You may be a very 
poor Christian, probably you are — we all of us are— but at 
every stumble and lapse, and everything that reveals to us how 
low we are down yet on the scale, take courage : you have got 
God for you ; He is on your side, and all the universe may 
be on the other side, and it won't amount to that. Who can 
harm us if God be for us ? " Who can separate us from the 
love of God in Christ Jesus ? " Height or depth, or length 
or breadth, or things to come, or powers or principalities ? 
Oh, can anything take the child away from the mother's 
bosom in the household ? Not its naughtiness, not its fretful- 
ness, not its weakness, not its sickness — the mother clings to 
it ; and the mother is the nearest commentary on Jesus Christ 
that the world has yet. Go, look at your musty volumes and 
commentaries all the way down — Latin, Greek, English • the 
mother in the family is the best commentary on what the love 
of Jesus Christ is to lost and ruined souls in this world. 

Take courage, O sinner, for the publican was not con- 



Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 6$ 

demned, the Pharisee was. The Pharisee, you know, had one 
of those oratorical convictions and conversions ; the publican 
had nothing but the consciousness of his own sinfulness ; but 
he went down justified rather than the other. 

But then there is a theological difficulty which good and 
honest men entertain. They say all this sets men a-doing 
their own work, and it takes from the sovereignty of God all 
honour and all glory. I believe thoroughly in God's sovereignty. 
I believe He can convert a man in any way He pleases ; and 
who are you, O theologian, that says He must convert him in 
just that way? I think that God converts a man that is slow 
and stolid, and has no imagination, in a way that is suited to 
that fact of human construction, and that He converts a man 
that is a poet in a way that is exactly adapted to that peculiar 
material He has got to work on. God does not convert 
paving-stones into roses, but He does convert roses from roots 
into bushes, and branches into roses. He works on men as 
He works on Nature. There are certain laws by which He 
works in Nature. Cause and effect are constant everywhere, 
and He works upon that greater Nature, the top of Nature, 
the sum and substance of Nature, human life and human ex- 
perience, not in its basic forms, but experimental forms, ac- 
cording to His own will — that is to say, He adapts Himself to 
the facts that are in the man, brings him out along the way 
of experience that the man needs himself. iVnd we take no 
glory from God. There are twelve different gates in the 
Apocalypse to the New Jerusalem. There are a great many 
more gates than that to the spiritual New Jerusalem. The 
man that comes in at the North gate must not throw stones at 
him who comes in at the South ; and the man who comes in 
at the East must not say anything against the man that comes 
in at the West. Anybody that loves God, and shows it every 
day in his disposition and his life, loves his fellow men ; he has 
found the gate for him. 

Then, dearly-beloved brethren, Christians all, have you been 
born again ? Have you been born again and again and again ? 
Have you gone up step by step, through the lower, intermediate, 
and into the higher experiences ? At every single stage of un- 
folding that Voice, still sweeter than music, but imperious as 
the empire's voice, says : " Ye must be born again." You 
have overcome your lusts and your passions ; have you gone 
higher than that ? You have entered into the kingdom of 
morality, of social affections, of affiances. Good! Have you 



64 Nicodemus and the Re-Birth. 

gone higher than that ? You have gone into the outskirts of 
the moral kingdom, the religious, the spiritual; have you 
gone higher than that ? What is there higher than spiritual ? 
There is this that is higher than spiritual — quality, quantity, 
harmony. Here is the organ, and as the builder builds one 
part after another, all its sub-basses, diapasons, and all the 
other instruments represented in it, it is full of cacophony as it 
sounds one stop, then another and another ; by-and-by he has 
brought them all together, and he tries and proves them till 
they are brought into harmony with each other, and he voices 
the organ so that the effect shall be the sweetest possible, and 
then, when at last it is all there, and all the appliances to bring 
wind, to make the sound, and top and bottom and side of the 
organ are in perfect harmony with itself, and the voicing has 
given to every stop its very sweetest tone, then we say it is 
completed. Have you come to that condition in which grace 
is spontaneous ? Does it harmonise from the top clear down 
to the bottom, and has it come not occasionally and forced, 
but has it come to the condition of spontaneity, automatic, so 
that without thinking you do the things that are right ? Have 
you come to that higher stage of Christian experience in 
which, with fear and trembling, you yet can say : " I see God ; 
I know God ; He dwelleth in me and I in Him ? " May God 
give us all this higher light ! While we go on preaching to 
sinners, oh, let us preach to ourselves — Ye need to be born 
again. 



THE FRUITvS OF THE SPIRIT 



"For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty ; only use not liberty 
for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another." — Gal. v. 13. 

THE only bondage in God's Creation that is tolerable and 
desirable is the bondage of love. No man knows 
true happiness till he has learned how to love— how to love, 
not a little, but a great deal ; how to love, not occasionally, as 
a sweetmeat at a banquet, but how so to love that he is tied 
up by it ; he is in bondage to it, it rules him. For the only 
slave on God's earth that needs no compassion and pity is the 
slave of love. And yet liberty is as little understood in the 
general way as almost any one single name or quality. Govern- 
ment, restriction, are the thoughts of rulers ; men are not to 
be trusted ; men are beaten about by so many passions that if 
a man is to be left perfectly free, he is a dangerous animal ; 
we must, therefore, have governments for men. Yet in this 
very chapter, and further down, as we shall see by-and-by, 
there is a strain of music: "Against such," as he described, 
and as I shall, " against such there is no law." Is there a 
liberty, therefore, where there is no law ? Yes, and there is no 
liberty anywhere else. Is it, then, the Gospel doctrine that 
laws and governments, officers, courts, restrictions, are all to 
be abolished ? Yes ; but that will be in the millennium. If 
there is ever a time coming when men, living in their essential 
manhood, in the spiritual man, and when they are inspired 
with the desire of being and doing that which makes them in 
alliance with God, so that they would rather speak the truth 
for their own sake than be false, that they would rather be 
benevolent than selfish, and had rather be humble than proud ; 
when men, in other words, have come into spiritual things, into 
the same conditions as those in which they come in spiritual 
things, they will need no government. When a boy first begins 



66 The Fruits of the Spirit 

his arithmetic it takes a good deal of time and trouble for him 
to cypher, and he says: "Six and three are — eight; no, six 
and three are — six, seven, eight, nine — six and three are nine. 
An old merchant would be ashamed to go on cyphering in 
such a laborious way as that ; and a banker or an accountant 
can take four columns of figures, and run them down faster 
tban I can run down a page of writing. Nobody has learned 
anything until he does it without knowing it. When anybody 
begins to walk after he has been long sick, he iakes care of 
every step ; but when a man is in full health, he never stops to 
see whether he shall step here, there, or anywhere else. The 
man who is fit to take care of himself does spontaneously the 
thing that ought to be done. No man has learned a language 
if he has to go to the dictionary and the grammar to know 
about it. No man has learned music who has to sit down at 
the key-board and spell out his notes. No man becomes a 
compositor in a printing office who has to think where the 
letters are. His hand thinks, and he himself is thinking of 
something else while he is composing his sentence out from 
among the type. Knowledge that has been reduced into a 
man's own self, so that he knows it automatically, spontane- 
ously, that we call knowledge. Now our graces are largely 
occasional practices, and our daily life is, to a very large extent, 
automatic in selfishness and in animalism. We do not have to 
think when we have to get angry. The moment the offensive 
thing is said flash goes the anger. The moment a man cheats 
us the wrath comes, up ; we do not have to pump it ; it takes 
care of itself. And in all our lower range of life we act 
spontaneously. Too often in our higher range of life we have 
to strive before we have the initial experiences. 

Now the apostle says : "You are free, Christ came to set 
you free ; only abuse not your liberty as an occasion to the 
flesh." You are not free in material and bodily conditions. 
Man is not free to fly ; he has not any wings. Man is not free 
to act without eating ; he has got to eat. The circle of our 
liberty in bodily matters is a very small circle ; but in that 
small circle men have an amazing amount of liberty. And so 
the apostle says : " Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty, 
but do not mistake the currency, do not take the wrong kind ; 
only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love 
serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, 
this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'' There is not 
a man or woman in this congregation who ever fulfilled that 



The Fruits of the Spirit. 67 

law — not one. " But if ye bite and devour one another, take 
heed that ye be not consumed one of another." Moral canni- 
balism is very largely practised yet. " This, I say then, walk 
in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." 
Paul makes two men out of every one ; or, rather, there are 
two- men in every one ; and in that he touches very close on 
to the modern scientific doctrine that man was born as an 
animal first, and that by evolution through the Divine decree 
and the Divine Spirit, there was superinduced upon the animal 
man — man social, moral, intellectual, spiritual. If you take 
the seventh chapter of Romans, no man can steer through 
that troubled passage unless he goes upon this theory, that 
man, according to the apostolic idea, is a double being — the 
lower part is an animal, the upper part — the upper part, if 
there is an upper part — rides him, and is not ridden by him. 

So he goes on to tell us what he means by the flesh man, 
what in modern parlance we mean by the animal man, the 
under man ; and here is the description : " For the flesh " — he 
gives it in the broadest terms as it is exemplified in the largest 
abuse of our animal powers ; for there is not one constituent 
element of animal life that is not, in its place and in due sub- 
ordination, right, and it is only the excess and disproportion of 
it, and the usurpation by it of the higher functions of human 
existence, that makes animalism wrong. " For the flesh " — the 
animal element that is in you — "lusteth against the Spirit, and 
the Spirit against the flesh." Now you have got the origin of 
sin ; you have the conflict between the developed man in Jesus 
Christ and the original animal man. The two are perpetually 
warring against each other, the under man refusing to be 
bridled, guided by the inspiration of reason and moral sense 
and moral excellence — love, uttermost love ; and, on the other 
hand, the higher elements in man constantly condemning the 
impulses that are tormenting him — gluttony, drunkenness, 
envyings, all forms of lust. And here sit two courts, the in- 
fernal court below, and the supernal court above, and they 
are perpetually quarrelling with each other's decisions. This 
is going on through life, and every time the under one prevails 
over the upper one, that is sin. It is comprehensive enough ; 
the particulars every man can learn by his own autobiography. 
"The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the 
flesh ; and these are contrary the one to the other ; so that ye 
cannot do the things that ye would." And what a piteous 
history is that of ninety-nine men in a hundred, who, if they 



68 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

be conscious and faithful to their own selves, are obliged every 
day to say : " I knew I had an ideal, I knew what was right, 
I set out to do what was right, but all through the chequered 
day I have done the things I meant not to do, and have 
neglected to do the things that I intended to do." 

And this conflict, this unceasing conflict between the upper 
and the lower man is that that led the Apostle to say : " Who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " The body, 
the animal man, that is constantly intruding where it has no 
business, sullying the clear sky of love, dimming, clouding the 
day, and making us creep along the material ways of life when 
with wings we ought to soar by love and joy, and get into the 
higher and unclouded realms of experience. 

"But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." 
I am not under the law — of picking pockets, that is. If the 
law were abolished to-morrow, I would not pick anybody's 
pocket. I am not under the law of murder ; for if there were 
no gallows, nor guillotine, nor officer, nor judge, nor court 
nor decision, nor execution, I would not murder. Why? 
I have that law inside myself — humanity. I do not want 
cruelty ; I hate it. I am not under the law to drunkenness. 
I can go by a whole regiment of shops, and never think of 
turning in ; I do not want it, I am above it. I do not abstain 
from gambling because gambling is disreputable, nor because 
I fear losses. I do not gamble, because I do not want to 
gamble. I do not avoid bad company because I should 
lose respectability. I do not keep bad company for the 
same reason that musicians do not sit down and work out 
discords ; their ear suffers from discords, and they keep to 
harmony because harmony is so sweet and discord is so painful. 
And so in regard to spiritual things. We are led by the 
Divine Spirit into such a state of approbation and satisfaction 
in the higher things that we do not want the inferior, the 
antagonistic, the antithetic. " If ye are led of the Spirit ye are 
not under the law." Do you suppose that a bird, seeing a 
man in the muddy road toiling up the long ascent, when he 
can shoot through the air on even wing and go quicker and 
easier, would envy the man, or would stoop down to use his 
legs instead of his wings ? No. A man as respects his lower 
nature may be said to walk ; he touches the earth at every 
step, man in his higher nature lifts himself above the morass, 
above the ravine, above the mountain, and goes by th e 
shortest course to the noblest things. " If ye be led of th 



The Fruits of the Spirit. 69 

Spirit ye are under the law," that is, ye do the things by 
the law that is in you and by your preferences and loves and 
likes, which otherwise are commanded. There is not in all 
the statute books of the whole civilised globe one single law 
saying to the mother, " Thou shalt love thy babe," there is 
not any church or creed, or any form of legislature that says to 
the mother, "Thou shalt feed thy babe out of thine own 
body." But see the mother as the twilight darkens, sitting 
with her child as it draws sustenance from her own bosom, 
and singing sweet carols, and counting it the proudest of all the 
hours of the day. She has the law of the mother in her, and 
she does the things that ought to be done, because she loves 
to do them — it is automatic. 

" Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these : 
Adultery " — there is the quality carried to its fullest extent, 
despising the restraints and laws of society. " Fornication, 
uncleanness " — for there is a depth beyond adultery and forni- 
cation — a salacious imagination, a fire of lust that goes on in a 
man's own secret chambers of the soul. " Lasciviousness " — 
as Galatia was a Greek colony, and as the Greeks were the 
most abominably corrupt in all social relations of any nation 
that ever lived, dissolved and rotten in their lasciviousness, 
you see with what speciality the Apostle specifies all the forms 
of that vice which has corrupted mankind and the world. 
" Idolatry " — idolatry in ancient days was not condemnable on 
orthodox creed principles ; it was not because they made a 
mistake about their god ; it was because idolatry made a part 
of their worship the indulgence of lascivious affections, and 
everywhere bestiality ran with idolatry. "Witchcraft" — if 
there is no such thing as witchcraft, the counterfeit is amaz- 
ingly like it, and we have a good deal of it yet. " Hatred" — 
now you come to a very popular form, because there are 
multitudes of persons who think that hatred is sacred, that 
you are bound to hate the man who doesn't go to your church,, 
bound to hate the man who is not orthodox, bound to hate- 
the Romanist and Romanism ; and if God looked out of 
Heaven with all the variations of impression which so-called 
Christian men have, he would hate about four-fifths, yes, 
nineteen-twentieths of all the creatures that live on the face of 
the earth. Of all Christian graces, I think the easiest and 
most productive is hatred. " Variance, emulations " — that is, 
disagreements and strifes one against another. " Wrath, 
strife" — quarrelsomeness; "seditions" — breaking out into up- 



70 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

roar against law, order, government. " Heresies," not doctrinal 
disagreements ; that is not the original meaning of the word 
heresy : heresy had always a moral element in it, according to 
the original intent of the word. " Envyings, murders, drunken- 
ness, and such like." 

Now these are all animal ; they all spring from the basilar 
faculties, they all come from the base of the brain ; they were 
original; in their primitive and organic forms they simply 
made the material platform on which God was to build the 
real man ; yet they are constantly tending to subtend every 
form of human life. But have you ever heard an ambitious 
organist undertaking to show what can be done in the 
gymnastics of music ? He goes screwing his way up through 
all the chromatic scale with all sorts of thunderous conjunction 
of sound until he has shown that the organ is devilish, or you 
feel so, but at last some gale of good sense overtakes him, and 
he begins to modulate and gives out some sudden rare strain, 
such as Beethoven or Mozart hath given birth to. So out 
from the cacophony of harsh and ugly affections and passions 
the text modulates into the very melody and music of religion. 

"The fruit of the Spirit." That word " fruit " is a very great 
favourite in the New Testament and also in the Old Testament. 
Christ made it almost fundamental. There is the vine, and 
its bearing or not bearing fruit ; or, as an interpreter of Divine 
Providence, it is pruned that it may bring forth more fruit. 
The quality of fruitfulness runs through the whole New Testa- 
ment, latent, or obvious and expressed. " The fruit of the 
Spirit." " Oh ! " says the hierarch, "the fruit of the Spirit is 
organised churches, subordination to God's ministers, clear 
and definite instruction in fundamental doctrines, reverence, 
and awe in the presence of God, obedience of common folks 
to uncommon folks. That," say they, is "the fruit of the 
Spirit." But I do not read it here. " The fruit of the Spirit. " 
Why, then, this world is God's garden — God's orchard. 
I should like to know the sort of things that God does like 
to raise in His garden ; I should like to see the list of 
His orchard, the fruit for which God sustains the garden, 
the orchard, and the farm, for which His Providence controls 
events, for which the whole experience is blown as a sweet 
gale that blows away the winter and brings on the spring. 
The fruit of the Spirit, over which all God's singing birds, 
in hymns and psalms of thanksgiving, do chant melody — 
the fruit of the Spirit — the end which is sought in this 



The Fruits of the Spirit. 71 

world among men by the Spirit, the ripeness which is the 
result of the fostering care of God's Spirit — what is it? 
Catechism ? Not a word of it. Confession of faith ? Not 
a word of it. And yet these are not necessarily to be rejected, 
they are not to be disallowed. " The fruit of the Spirit." What 
if a man, sending his children to a dancing school, should ever 
after insist upon it that they should reverence the fiddle and 
the dancing-master and worship them ? What are these but 
mere mechanical appliances by which to teach grace and 
method ? And so soon as grace and method are once 
organised into a person, the school at which he learned them 
goes behind and is forgotten. No child will be an expert 
arithmetician that does not first dig in the mire of the common 
school ; but afterwards he abandons that. When we read we 
do not stop to look at the spelling, unless we run against a 
false one, and then instinct brings us up. We become so 
habituated to it that we gather that which hovers over the 
letter, and is in the air, as it were, the meaning, and it is 
interpreted back by the heart, by the experience, by the 
affections. The fruit of the Spirit is that which is underlaid by 
culture, but culture itself is not it. The text is not the pre- 
cious thing, it is the meaning in the text that is precious. A 
farm must have its implements, but it is the harvest that is of 
value, and they are relative. If a man can make a good crop 
with the poorest instruments he is better off than his neigh- 
bour who has ten times better instruments but a poorer crop. 
And if a man can make out of heresies a better Christian life 
than another man does out of his orthodoxy, he is nearer to 
God than the orthodox man. This is not disowning instru- 
ments, not at all, but it is saying substantially that men are 
perpetually worshippers and idolators of outside means, and 
quite forget that their value depends entirely on what they 
produce. So we have in the world, in the religious world, 
a vast amount of the means of grace without much grace. 
And yet when men criticise these things, when faithful pastors 
undertake to set forth to their congregation that while instru- 
ments or means of grace are useful there is something higher 
and better, "Oh, dear! dear!" they say, holding up holy 
hands in horror, "where is the end going to be if you take 
away the foundations ? " The foundations are on the top in 
Christian character, not on the bottom ! Then what are these 
fruits for which religion is established, for which churches and 
all forms of moral organisation exist, without which, as the 



72 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

apostle declares in keenest ridicule, all religion is as sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbal? The noisiest instrument in the 
band is the emptiest one. 

Now listen to the fruits of the Spirit for which a Church is 
established and without the production of which it is like an 
empty field, for which all doctrinal schedules are ordained, 
without which they are but sounding brass and tinkling 
cymbal, for which all orders and regulations and methods 
are framed, and if they do not bring forth these there is no 
sacredness in them, and there is no irreligiousness in trampling 
them under foot. It is the soul that God has filled ; it is the 
upper man where God is the cultivator, and husbandman, and 
fruiterer ; it is the higher man, not the under man. And here 
are the harvests. The fruit of the Spirit is — of course it is — 
is what ? It is the one thing that carries in its bosom every- 
thing else ; it is the mother around which are gathered the 
group of children ; u the fruit of the Spirit is love." You would 
not think it, to see how ministers act ; you would not think it, 
to see how converted Christians act; you would not dream 
it by merely reading confessions of faith, which do not discard 
it, but which, as far as I can remember, scarcely ever mention 
it. Talk about orthodoxy, sound words, wise discrimination ! 
The mother of all things in the soul is love. I do not know 
what men do when they go into those great, dark cathedrals, 
and stoop down on pretence of praying, and sit in a kind of 
stupid reverence, and are shocked by any wild ebullitions of 
life ; or a congregation made happy by the luxuriant liberty of 
a sanctified soul. They do not know whereunto such things 
will grow. " The fruit of the Spirit is love." 

And the very next thing to this word means God in us ; it 
is "Joy." How is that for sobriety? Stern-faced, sharp, 
critical man, that thinks a smile is the shadow of a coming 
devil, how is that ? Love first, next joy. What is joy ? It is 
the response of each of the higher faculties of a man's soul, 
when it is brought up to concert pitch. Every one of them 
tends to produce pleasure, joyfulness, alertness, liberty. 

11 The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace." What is peace ? 
One would suppose it is going to sleep in church. One would 
suppose it to be simply the absence of pain. Peace has a 
positive existence. When the soul in every part of itself is 
stayed upon some good centre, upon God and Christ in the 
love of God — when every part of the soul ceases to be hungry, 
when it has no clamour, no sorrow, but is restful, glad, and 



The Fruits oj the Spirit. 73 

perfectly composed, in a sweet harmony in itself, that is 
peace. 

" Long-suffering." (I am going over this catalogue again ; 
I have other applications of it, so I will not develop all that I 
think about it.) Long-suffering : we admire that quality a 
great deal more than we practise it. We admire long-suffering 
in other folks. We admire long-suffering in the schoolmaster, 
in the regent mother, in the creditor to whom we owe a debt. 
It inspires almost the dignity of perfect beauty. A man that 
will let you abuse him, a man that will let you cheat him even, 
a man that forgets to-day what you said or did yesterday — his 
long-suffering, oh, how beautiful it is ! It is a patience that is 
not easily provoked and thinketh no evil. Yet look at that 
matron who through the years of early life inherited bereave- 
ments and sorrows, the thinning out of the precious flock, the 
dishonoured name of the husband, the death, the rolling upon 
her of the responsibility of rearing the whole flock, the un- 
wearied fidelity, the inexhaustible patience, furrow after furrow 
that experience is ploughing upon her brow ; at last the 
children had come to ripeness, and they in their turn are 
lifting her out of trouble, and she sits serene at the close of 
life more beautiful than the going down of the sun. Is there 
any object in life that a man can look upon that is more beau- 
tiful than long-suffering ? 

u Gentleness." Now, gentleness is not a quality of not 
having vim. When a man is strong and energetic, and at the 
same time uses his strength and energy and power with sweet- 
ness, that is gentleness. See the great swarthy smith as he 
returns from the anvil, every muscle herculean, after the day's 
labour washing himself that he may come back to his own 
complexion. As the little child totters out to him, see with 
what ineffable sweetness he gathers up the little one on his 
shoulder, and holds the babe in his arm. He that could swing 
a giant and slay him walks about the servant of the little chil- 
dren, so gently that they love him almost more than they love 
the mother's bosom. It is the sweetness of strength in an 
element of love that makes gentleness. It is not an attribute 
of weakness ; weakness is not gentle. 

" Goodness" That is a very comprehensive word that every- 
body uses and nobody defines. It is a sort of mixture of 
everything. It is where all the qualities are brought together 
and shine out. It is a composite grace. 

" Faith" What is that ? Believing things you do not 



74 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

understand? No. It is sanctified imagination ; it is having 
the horizon above the world ; it is believing that there are 
things that have no mortal forms ; it is believing in a future, 
believing in a whole assembly of intelligence above your head ; 
it is having a life hereafter, a greater life than this. Ah ! the 
man who sits in his house all day knows exactly what he 
knows — that is the fireplace, that is the rug, that is the fender, 
that is the window, that is the door. That is what is called a 
practical person, who knows what he does know. But out of 
doors the whole heaven is above his head, night and day, filled 
with inestimable treasures. 

' Meekness.'' That is a form of love. If a man smite you 
in the face your bodily nature says : " Smite him back again." 
If a man betrays you in the bitterest way, nature, in the bad 
sense of that term, says : " Give him as good as he sent." 
What is meekness ? It is receiving personal injury, yet having 
such a predominant spirit of love in you that you wish the man 
that does it good. It is not retaliation, it is being so filled 
with the love and nature of Jesus Christ that you give back 
blessing for railing and cursing, prayers for those that despite- 
fully use you. That is the definition. Do you know what 
meekness is ? Any man that knows what perfect meekness is 
is at liberty to rise up without any danger of disturbing this con- 
gregation. 

" Temperance^ is the next; self-control, self-government, 
which in the ordinary range of life is indispensable to educa- 
tion, and indispensable to conduct — the power of controlling 
ourselves and keeping the body under. 

Now, with regard to this chapter, bear in mind, if you please, 
that this is the inspired definition and declaration of the Chris- 
tian religion as made manifest by Christ's chief servant, the 
Apostle Paul. And I remark, in the first place, that there are 
a great many men who have religion who have no Christianity. 
What is religion ? It is reverence, it is worship. Its remote 
origin was fear. It was a sense of a man's danger in the 
presence of the unknown Deity. It was an attempt, therefore, 
to palliate Him, to keep down His justice and wrath, and 
placate Him in some way. The original idea of bowing down 
before the king and the powers that be, and bowing down 
before God as if He were, the dreadful potentate of the universe 
— that was the idea of reverence, and there are multitudes ol 
teachers who inspire the idea into the young and old that 
reverence is the proper manifestation of religion. I say it is as 



The Fruits of the Spirit. 75 

far from it as it can possibly be. Every child is called on tc 
say in his earliest lispings : " Our Father." See the child that 
has a severe, harsh, unjust parent, how he steals in and looks 
to see if he is good-natured or not ; how he comes round the 
chair and never trespasses ; and by-and-by he touches him. 
What kind of a father is that that a child slavishly intrudes 
upon, not knowing whether he is going to give him a blow or 
a smile ? Any child that would come to me in that way is no 
child of mine. " Let us come boldly," says the Apostle, " to 
the throne of grace, because God knows everything about us." 
Naked and open are we before Him with whom we have to do. 
Fatherhood is universal invitation. The idea of God sitting in 
the heavens with a severe, stern law that He thinks more of 
than He does of the people under it, as the pulpit often teaches 
us, that God must take care of His law ! Christ says that 
God sends His rain on the good and the bad, and makes His 
sun shine on the just and the unjust, like the great heart of 
love brooding, not as the sun that rises and sets, but with an 
effulgence that has no night and no midnight. God says : 
" Come to Me, children ; come, I am your Father ; " and am I 
to come sneaking up unawares, to see if He is good-natured or 
not ? I come to Him with the rush and joy of childhood, not 
because I think I am worthy. A child does not think any- 
thing about whether he is worthy or unworthy ; a child is sped 
by love and received by love. Love, not reverence, is religion. 
"J°y" We seem to suppose that joy is very proper in the 
shop at proper times, in the house at suitable times, but that 
exhibitions of joy in the church are so irreverent that if a man 
smiles he does it behind his handkerchief, and those are the 
tricks that we try to play off with God ; as if children at home 
with Him whom we are taught to call "Father" should play 
all the tricks of the slave of the Oriental despot. God loves 
cheerfulness and mirthfulness, or Fie would not have sunk the 
fountains of them so deep in the best parts of the human 
soul. Do you suppose that when Fie sees the rejoicing child 
coming near to Him in mirth, re-echoing the very Psalms, do 
you suppose that He reproves him, or that his offering is 
received with abatement ? Now, religion is more than believing 
right. We believe right for the sake of developing religion — 
Christian religion. If we believe right, and have no religion, 
we are like that vine which the prophet denounced : " Where- 
fore, when I came, brought it forth wild grapes?'' or the fig- 
tree that had no figs. Thousands and thousands of men have 



76 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

substituted their creed for their religion. They have a petri- 
fied, creed ; they do not believe that anybody one inch outside 
of that creed has any considerable chance in future. They 
have read in vain all the way through, with and without spec- 
tacles, that love is the fulfilment of the law, and that he who 
loves knows God, for God is Love, and that he who knows not 
love knows not God. They have read that, and have heard it 
said again and again it is the end of the law for righteousness — 
that is, for manhood; it is the beginning, the middle, the end, 
the chief factor, the great producer ; yet there are many men 
to-day in chairs and pulpits, up and down throughout the land, 
that are looking at men askance whose lives are as sweet as 
flowers, and whose juice is sweet as apples and peaches, and 
say that they will be damned, that they are forsaking the truth. 

Now, it is not for me to say that systems of theology are to 
be ignored ; but while we use them we are to use them as im- 
plements and instruments, not as final ends. It is a great deal 
better that men should learn to read by going to school — that is, 
schools are conveniences that most easily teach men to read 
and the elements of education ; but there was many a slave who 
lay on his belly and learned his letters by the fire or the light of 
the pine torch, and when he learned his letters he could read. 
Imagine a man saying to him : " Have you been at school ? " 
" No, sir ! '' "Then you cannot read." All creeds that tend 
to develop the understanding and moral sense and the higher 
affections are to be employed for that sake, and not for their 
own sake. The fundamental doctrines, the executive doctrines 
are only fundamental for you and for me as private Christians. 
If I am to teach I must take the knowledge and experience of 
men in days gone by, and use those forms of doctrine which 
have been found under the providence of God to convict men 
of sin, and bring them to the Lord Jesus Chust through faith, 
and build them up in a holy Christian life. There are multi- 
tudes of things that are most useful ; but even if you should 
change your creed to-day in the growing light of an advancing 
civilisation you do not touch your religion, any more than a man 
who changes an old plough for a new and better one changes 
agriculture. It is an instrument, and all doctrinal creeds are 
mere instruments ; but the things that they are to produce are 
love, joy, peace , long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, self -govern 
ment. 

There are, therefore, I think, a great many religious people 
and some Christians. There is an impression spread abroad 



The Fruits of the Spirit 77 

among the young very widely, that religion is a thing to be 
put off as long as they can ; or that religion, if it has joys, 
has special joys that belong to religion. If a man wants a full 
outplay of his own nature, he must bring his constitutional 
faculties up into the realm and atmosphere of the religious 
spirit ; then there will be sources of joy. There is a vague 
impression in the world that men's joy springs out of this : " I 
am going to be saved ; when I die I am going to heaven." 
Then they make up a sort of allegory or imagination as to 
what kind of time it will be, and it reflects itself back to them. 
But the teaching of the Word of God is this — that the true 
development of our minds and faculties according to the Lord 
Jesus Christ gives them harmony and melody in themselves, 
and joy springs out of everything, out of sorrow itself, out of 
sin, as old Martin Luther, in his audacious and grand way, 
says : " Blessed be God for my sins," and the consciousness of 
their degradation ; and over against it the wondrous atoning 
love of Jesus Christ made him feel : " If it had not been for 
my sins I should never have had such a view as that ; " just as 
a man may say: ''Blessed be the storm," when he sees the 
rainbow spanning the heavens. 

A true life in Jesus Christ is a life of liberty, of largeness, 
of joyfulness and peacefulness, and if a man wants to get the 
most out of the life that he is living in this world it is better 
that he should reap the crop out of the top of his head and not 
out of the bottom of it. 

His passions give him a certain sort of joy — lurid, but they 
wear out and shade down, his self-contentment growing less 
and less as the years increase ; but the joys that spring from 
the top of the mind, the spiritual man, are least in the 
beginning ; increment comes day by day, and they blossom 
when all the world is under frost, like the asters and chrysan- 
themums of our garden grow full blossomed into the world. 
When heart and flesh fail, then in the man that is living in the 
true spirit of Jesus Christ, and under the enchantment of love ; 
then, when property is lost or passes out of his hand, when no 
man chanting never so sweetly can fill his ear with music, 
when weeping friends are no longer able to help him or he to 
receive their consolation — then, when the tabernacle is being 
taken down, joyfulness springs up, and is never so great as 
when a man passes from glory to glory. 

Another th'ng I wish to say is that we have got to have a 
new light on the subject of preaching the Gospel of Christ 



78 The Fruits of the Spirit. 

Men are ordained to preach the text, to preach the intellectual 
elements of the Gospel but no man ever preaches effectually 
to the hearts of men any more Gospel than he has in his own 
heart. Ideas are not Gospel ; dispositions are Gospel ; and 
he who brings to men thoughts of liberty in all things right and 
noble and good, and cheerfulness, and lovableness, and 
forgiveness, and patience, and long-suffering, and gentleness in 
the warfare of this life — he that lives Christ knows Christ, 
and can preach Christ. Nobody else can. You may bring 
me a catalogue of fruits ; all the fruits of earth do not taste 
good out of a catalogue. Bring me one cluster from the 
orchard, that touches at once my palate and my imagination. 
Gospel living is the only ordination that can make a man 
God's priest and God's minister. 

Then I say more than this. I say that the fruits of the spirit 
will kill that red dragon of Infidelity dead. Men do not 
believe in a Church, many of them, and men do not believe 
in the Bible as it lies to their understanding, and they do not 
believe in what they call the fantastic experiences of men who 
do not know themselves. Men say : " As for that which be- 
longed to the old Church lore, we have demonstrated that it is 
not true, and we have no occasion for Church and no occasion 
for ministry — we are Agnostics in so far as most of theology is 
concerned ; and as to Christians, when we see some Chris- 
tianity amongst men we shall be better able to judge what it 
is worth." Now, I say that while a man may doubt the in- 
spiration of Scripture, and the origin of the race, and the 
nature of sin and of responsibility, and the tenets in regard 
to the Trinity, and the special philosophical theories, of which 
there have been eighteen or nineteen different ones, as to the 
atonement of Jesus Christ — while men may say in regard to 
all these : " It is all foreign to me ; " bring me, if you please, 
the man who really sees love, and who will say : "I do not 
believe in it." Everybody believes in it — the child, the 
mother, the wife, the husband, the father, the neighbour, the 
sweetheart — everybody believes in love. And everybody 
believes in joy. Whoever heard sweet-toned bells in a chime 
that did not stop to listen ? Why, at Antwerp I sat for hours 
under the spire of that vast cathedral to hear those chimes 
that rang out every quarter of an hour. It seemed as if the 
heavens rained music down upon me. Whoever saw real, 
simple, unalloyed, happy childhood that did not stop to look 
at it ? Whoever saw a school let out that did not wait to see 



The Fruits of the Spirit. 79 

it ? Whoever saw a bevy of sweet girls going to and fro with 
laughter on the street who did not wish he was an artist? 
Whoever saw happiness in the family when on Thanksgiving- 
day or Christmas-day the whole circle of them entwined in 
each other and around each other, and merry hours went past 
even to the small hours of the night — whoever saw that and 
said: "I am an infidel; I do not believe in joy"? 
Whoever saw a great heart on whom time had spent itself, 
and the waves dashed against him, and the commotion of the 
people raged round about him, who lifted his head in calm- 
ness and patience and all peacefulness, sure of God and sure 
of the future — whoever saw such heroism and did not admire 
it ? Whoever saw long-suffering anywhere and did not call it 
heroic ? Whoever saw a wife — of all tragedies bloodless, but 
the most horrible — marrying in the freshness of her early 
life an ideal husband, only to find out little by little that she 
was worshipping an idol — gambling, drunken, licentious, 
removed further and further from her in moral character — yet 
she must needs cling to him, and of all lying outside of hell I 
know of nothing so loathsome as for one to lie side by side with 
a brutal beast, whose every sense gives evidence of rottenness ; 
yet how many holy women there have been who have borne it 
in the morning, at noon, at night, in youth, in middle life, and 
further on, and when at last the wretch dies, and everybody 
thanks God that he is gone, there is one that sheds tears over 
his dishonoured grave, and remembers only the things that she 
had thought of him — when one looks upon such heroism as 
that, who can say that he does not believe in long-suffering ? 
Infidelity is external — not the book, not the Church, not the 
officer, not the misinformed superstitious ; but there is no in- 
fidelity in the heart when you have reproduced the fruits of 
the Spirit before men ; and if there is ever to be a millennial 
day — and I believe there will be — it will not come until the 
sporadic cases of Christ's likeness are swallowed up in the 
multitude of them. If all those who sit here to-day were like 
the apostles of the Pentecost ; if everything that is animal and 
fleshly were subjected and reduced to its lowest terms ; if every- 
thing that was in you was rational and inspirational ; if every- 
thing in you was sweet and joyous, full of peace, goodwill, and 
self-sacrifice for others ; if all were thinking of others better 
than themselves — if this congregation were animated one single 
year with such experience as that, London would feel it like a 
change of climate. Here and there we have single Christian 



So The Fruits of the Spirit* 

— the head in the household — single Christians in obscurity 
and poverty, but we have never had communities, we have 
never had even whole churches, that had this true spirit of 
Christ, creating an atmosphere as well as an experience. 
When that day comes, oh, how fast the Gospel will gain its 
victories ! When that day comes, when all sects shall be, not 
made into one sect, not necessarily, but when they shall all be 
wrought into this high and royal spirit of love and mutual 
honour and respect, then look out ; the morning star has arisen 
and the Sun of Righteousness is not far. But if we think that 
with all our missionaries and all our church offerings we may 
cherish the spirit of the animal man, with its envyings, its 
jealousies, and separations, and still expect the millennial day, 
we shall be expecting, as the Jews did, that when their Messiah 
came He would come in arms and overthrow the empire, and 
lift them to a physical and national triumph. The kingdom of 
God is within us, and when the kingdom of God is displayed 
all men can but admire. 

Dearly beloved, it is for you and for me, for each of us in 
his own sphere and in the calling of God, to make mention to 
men and give a demonstration of the reality of religion. They 
do not believe it, selfish men, on your account ; they do not 
believe it, proud men, on your account ; self-indulgent men, 
you stand in the way of Christ. All you that are limp in your 
higher experiences and only strong in the lower, you stand in 
the way. Prepare the way ; take the stumbling-block out of 
the way, and then, when the ransomed of the Lord shall return 
to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their head, you 
shall swell the chorus, and you shall keep step with God's 
Anointed One. 



DIVINE COMPASSION 



" For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any 
two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, 
and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and 
intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in 
His sight : but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with 
whom we have to do. Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that 
is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our 
profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities ; but was in all points tempted liWe as we are, 
yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, 
that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." — Heb. 
iv. 12 — 16. 

" For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in 
things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for 
sins : Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are 
out of the way ; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity." — 
Heb. v. i, 2. 

THE Book of Hebrews and the Book of Romans, by 
different authors, are really on the same key, and we. 
lose very much truth and we gain a great deal of incon- 
venience in not taking into consideration the standpoint from 
which both of them were written. The Epistles of the New 
Testament were not like our sermons and lectures in this day 
that attempt to give an epitome of the whole theology ; they 
were rather the pleadings of a lawyer at the bar who has a 
good case, who, to be sure, brings out law, but only so much 
of it as is relevant to his aim. The whole of God's moral 
disposition was not declared in the Book of Romans, nor was 
it in the shape of a philosophical outline and encyclopaedic 
presentation of universal moral truth. Here were people of 
God that had been educated through centuries, and with this 
great object in view, how to build a man perfectly — righteous- 
ness ; that was the aim and ideal of the whole Old Testament, 
how to build up a man so that he should be God's ideal of a 

/ 



82 Divine Compassion. 

man. And they tried to do it by bringing to bear outward 
institutions and outward instructions upon the man, not dis- 
daining inward, but outward as the means of inward ex- 
clusively ; and at last the testimony was, " What the law could 
not do in that it was weak " — not the theologian's conception 
of moral law to day, but the Jews' idea of law as embodied in 
the Mosaic institutions in that day ; the Apostle says to them : 
"We have tried what this law of institutions, liturgies, and 
services could do, and in that it was weak through the flesh " 
— that is dealing with men that were full of bodily infirmities 
— " it could not effect the end of righteousness." It did not 
touch a great many, it touched the conscience of better men 
and worked distrust and distress and so on. The Book of 
Romans is an epitome of that — how conscientious men that 
undertook righteousness according to any high scale were con- 
victed at every step of such sinfulness, and at last they flung 
themselves in despair and said : " Who shall deliver us from 
the body of this death ? " The body was their trouble ; for 
man is an animal first, and his passions are the strongest part 
of his nature ordinarily, and they last up to the gates of 
Jerusalem. The serpent, it is said, when boys kill him in the 
field, never dies until the sun goes down, so men have found 
not that the serpent in them is not killed until the Sun of 
Righteousness arises. The Book of Romans was an argument 
of the Apostle to show to them that Christ was a better 
organiser of righteousness than were all Mosaic institutions. 
They were good enough, they were not actually to be thrown 
away in a sense, but if you will take a living person that will 
work righteousness in you a great deal easier than a dead form. 
We learn a great deal out of books ■ but, ah, when a child has 
a mother, when the student has a professor, or a teacher, we 
learn from a living person what a dead book cannot teach us, 
though dead books are very good so far as they go. So of the 
dead law, the law of ceremonies, of baptisms, of days, of 
months, of various observances, Paul says not that they are to 
be condemned as having been useless, but that they do not go 
far enough ; the flesh is too strong to be controlled in that way, 
and he reveals to them that all that the law sought to do, Jesus 
undertook to do ; that to build men up in righteousness, ac- 
cepting Him by faith, a faith that works by love, would put 
men into a better position to attain the great end of the Jewish 
life than anything else could. That was the argument of the 
Book of Romans. And as part of that argument, of course 



Divine Compassion. 83 

there is to be more or less of the delineation of the character 
of Christ, but that was incidental, illustrative. The purpose 
with which Paul, as a special pleader, was addressing his 
countrymen as an audience or a jury, if you please to say so — 
the purpose he had was not the absolute and final exposition 
of the Divine government and the Divine nature, but it was 
this : Jesus Christ stands as a cause that will procure you the 
ambition of your fathers and your own for righteousness better 
than any ceremonial means whatever. 

Now comes the Book of Hebrews. We know not who its 
author is ; we know it was not Paul. You might just as well 
talk Choctaw and say that is the language of New England or 
Old England. The style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is 
impossible to Paul. There is but one place in which the writer 
says " I,'' and I think that is towards the close ; but in Paul's 
writings " I " stands out as thick as spears do in a battle — it is 
" I," "I." "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." There 
is a most imperial and superb egotism in Paul which is not 
offensive, simply because he had lost his sense of personality. 
" I am in Christ, and Christ is in me." " The life that I now 
live in the flesh I live by faith, that is, in the Son of God, who 
loved me and gave Himself for me." He is all the time 
assuming a double personality. It is as if his private Paul self 
was transfused and controlled utterly by the other I — Jesus. 
Now, this Book of Hebrews, by this other man, whoever he 
was, is an attempt in a different way. It takes up the various 
ordinances and institutions and offices and functions of the 
Hebrew economy, and undertakes seriatim to show that over 
against every one of them there stood an equivalent in the 
living person, Jesus Christ. Now, there was no person in the 
Hebrew economy that was so revered as their high priest, so 
loved and trusted in the better days of the Jewish common- 
wealth. He became more corrupt in the political times 
preceding Christ and accompanying Him, and was a mere 
cat's-paw to the ruling forces; but the name high priest, as 
interpreted by the whole history of the Hebrew people, was 
one that was not only reverenced, but loved. He was ordained, 
it is said, to have compassion ; he was their highest ideal of 
purity ; he stood in the grandeur of a supposed inspiration ; he 
represented God, or, still better, he represented the people to 
God ; he was their advocate ; he stood in their place officially, 
and in every way helped to bring men up without any oppres- 
sion; He was a minister of mercy to them ; they adored Him, 



84 Divine Compassion. 

honoured Him, revered Him, loved Him ; and you could not 
have struck a bell that would echo and roll through the air 
with such melodious sound as by saying that Jesus Christ 
stood as a High Priest to the people, and that compassion was 
the great attribute of Jesus ; that He not only represented the 
people in their wants, but that He was a forthcomer of the 
very God Himself, and represented God to mankind as far as 
men obscured by the flesh are capable of understanding God. 
Oh, if God was only as big as you think He is, He would not 
be worth anybody's worship. If your thoughts could be His 
belt, what sort of God would He be ? You cannot measure 
the infinite wisdom by my ignorance, and you cannot measure 
the eternal glow and glory of love by my selfishness, and you can- 
not in the infirmities of human life in all its relationships have 
any satisfying representation of the grandeur, and richness, 
and infinite element of the Divine nature. So, in searching 
for some emblem the Apostle strikes through to the centre, 
and says that Jesus Christ is a High Priest to represent — 
what ? On the one side to represent the infirmities of men. 
He is clothed with them Himself; He had to make atone- 
ment for Himself, the High Priest ; but Jesus Christ, who was 
sacrificed, and was tempted and tried as men are tempted 
and tried, He knows all about it; He is touched with a 
feeling of our infirmities ; He knows the height, and depth, 
and length, and breadth of human experience and human 
need, and He is gone up to stand before God, our High 
Priest there ; and not only to represent the wants of mankind, 
but in doing that, and in that being described He represents to 
us what is the interior character of God Himself, and what is 
the economy of the Divine love. And according to the 
passage which I have read here let us look at what the repre- 
sentation which He makes of God is. 

Theology, for the most part, has got about half way through 
this description. The phrase, "the Word of God," means 
" God," according to a periphrasis that was not uncommon in 
that day. "Is quick" — living. The truth is a living thing; 
in other words ' ' Quick and powerful, sharper than any two- 
edged sword " — running into a battle figure — "'piercing even to 
the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and 
marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts'' — not alone of the 
conduct, which may come from complex reasons and thinkings 
but "a discerner of the thoughts " ; yes, and back of that, "and 
of the intents " — those shadowy impulses that precede a thought 



Divine Compassion. 85 

or a determination of the soul. God reads a man so that He 
sees clear through to the very beginning and shadowy substance 
of human conduct and human thought ; " the dividing asunder 
of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a dis- 
cerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." 

" Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His 
sight" Nobody hides, no pretences avail. God is clear- eyed, 
there can be no juggling with Him ; God is not deceived ; He 
knows the whole just as it is. " All things are naked and 
opened." A man may go, you know, in disguise to a mas- 
querade ; you may think a man is a king because he wears a 
crown and has a robe, but he may be a beggarly creature after 
all ; a man may seem like a gentleman, but you know he is a 
selfish dog inside ; a man may hide himself in a thousand ways 
by his apparel, but not before God. " All things are naked," 
all disguises are stripped off; no matter what a man's garments 
are, God looks upon men as if they stood stark naked inside 
and out ; " Unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do ; 
all things are manifest in His sight, naked and opened." That 
seems to be taking another figure, that of a book. You cannot 
tell by looking on a book what is inside of it. Open it and 
you can read it. Most men are books shut up, and the writing 
that is in them they do not care that you should see. But God 
opens the book, and God sees it. We are naked, as men 
stripped of disguises ; we are open before Him, as a book 
printed in broad type, and laid open before the eye. 

Now, if the Apostle had stopped there, it wil) make any man 
tremble in his shoes ; and, to a very great extent, hierarchs have 
stopped there. It is one of the most astonishing things in the 
world, that this is the foundation on which an appeal is made 
for hope and comfort and trust. For it says, " Seeing then 
that we have a great High Priest, that is passed into the 
heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. 
For we have not an High Priest which cannot be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all faculties (" points " 
it is in this version) tempted like as we are." He was not 
tempted as a father is, He was not a father ; not as husband is, 
He was never married ; nor as a bereaved mother, He was 
neither a mother, nor bereaved in that sense. " Tempted in 
all faculties." All these various outward experiences run back 
to certain faculties in the human soul, and there was not in Jesus 
Christ one single power that throbs and vibrates in the human 
soul that was not tried beyond anything that we are ever tried 



86 Divine Compassion. 

with in this mortal life. He has been " touched with the feel- 
ing of our infirmities.'' He was " in all points tempted as we 
are, yet without sin.'' "Let us, therefore, come boldly unto 
the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace 
to help in time of need." A man says to himself: "I began 
to live a Christian life, but temptations have dragged me down 
through my body, and selfishness and pride have played mis- 
chief with my resolutions. I have not been faithful to my 
covenant vows, and I don't believe that I am a Christian. It 
is no use my shuffling along in this miserable way ; there is no 
help for me. I am a miserable, insincere hypocrite, and there 
is no use in my trying any longer." Then the voice of God 
comes out from the throne of mercy and says : " On that very 
account come, come boldly, come to Me ; it is My nature, it is 
My business in the eternal sphere ; I love to take hold of those 
that are filled with infirmities, and whose infirmities break out 
into transgression, and after transgression into the sense of 
guilt." 

And then, as if that were not enough, he goes on to unfold 
the idea in the few first verses that I read from the next chap- 
ter. He says that a high priest is one who is "ordained for 
men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts 
and sacrifices for sins " ; and then he delineates this, which is 
to be the subject and marrow of my sermon, " Who can have 
compassion on the ignorant '' — the heathen, all in civilisation 
that are uninstructed, the half-sanctified, the wholly sinful, the 
harlot, the thief, the traitor, the man that wallows in corrup- 
tion. As the high priest has compassion on the ignorant ; as 
in the hospital not they that are almost well draw the surgeon 
first, but the men that are likely to die unless there is some 
styptic, unless there is something that can be done ; as the true 
physician runs to the case that is unusual, and that has eluded 
the skill of other men ; as the mortality and the danger draw 
the physician, so we have a High Priest that can be " touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities," and He is " ordained that 
He may have compassion on the ignorant and them that are 
out of the way " — drawn away by temptation, out of the way of 
virtue, out of the way of integrity, out of the way of honesty, 
out of the way of spirituality, out of the way of everything that 
is Divine, aspiring, God-like. Christ represents God, and God 
is thus interpreted out of Christ' Jesus to be in His own inward 
nature and purposes One who has the medication of the unwise 
as His concern continually. 



Divine Compassion. 87 

At present we do not know half about God, nor one thou- 
sandth part, nor in all eternity shall we know the circumference 
of the Divine Being, or His wonder, or the variety of His 
attributes that have never been made known to mortal men. 
" For ever learning, and still with more to learn." The 
character of God has been made known to us very imperfectly, 
and it had to be. There is a view of God which is developed 
from the mere history of Divine revelation. The revelation 
has followed the evolution of the human race, and that which 
takes place in every intelligent household has taken place in the 
great household of this world. For no father or mother ever 
undertook to deal with a child five years old as it dealt with the 
child when he was twenty-one. The child of five years old is 
taught what is true by fiction, and there is a sense in which 
falsehood is nearer the truth than the truth itself would be, so 
children always learn by fables. And Christ taught by parables 
simply because a fable or a parable is something parallel to the 
thing to be taught ; but in a lower sphere, and, understanding 
which, he can begin to get a glimmer of the truth in a higher 
relation. In the earlier periods of the human family, the 
belluine element excelled. Man was an animal historically, 
and that is still the basis on which are built intelligence and 
moral excellence. In the earlier periods of the world's history 
God was revealed in those aspects that would be most powerful 
to restrain animalism. Men were falling on every side under 
the influence of their passions, and as the whip goads the ox, 
and yet is not a symbol of government or of industry, as the goad 
is used to keep the cattle in the path, so in the earlier condi- 
tions and infancy of the human race, when the passions were 
strongest, and the animal life was strongest, the revelation 
of God's motive power was toward the part that the man could 
understand ; it was a low and physical manifestation of God 
as a God that governs the material world, which has certain 
fixed laws that cannot be broken without penalty immediate 
or remote ; and so He was represented in the earlier periods 
of the world as the all-compelling Governor of the world. 
That was as much as they could understand ; it was a great 
deal more than they did understand. Just as we in the 
childhood of our families govern our children, not simply out 
of the open book, but often out of the open palm, judiciously 
applied, so it was necessary in regard to the whole universal 
family of men, that that part which was sentient, that part 
which could receive chastisement should be appealed to. 



8S Divine Compassion, 

That was the aspect of God then developed to them. Not 
that there was not the other, for really in the Old Testament 
you have a perfectness of delineation of God that is not sur- 
passed even in the New Testament. That seems to be the 
ideal hung high for men to see ; just as Sunday is the ideal 
day, and a man says on Sunday : " Honesty is beautiful. I 
am going to be honest all this week ; I have been quarrelling 
a long time back, but I see now how beautiful concord is, and 
harmony among brethren." But he does not get three steps 
into Monday before he breaks these ideals down ; he is 
neither benevolent nor patient — he is irritable, he is grasping ; 
he forgets his Sunday, yet there is Sunday hanging in the air ; 
there is the ideal of a right life for ever before him. 

But there is to be something besides the ideal ; the real life 
is so different. So it seems to me that in the wonderful pas- 
sage in the 34th chapter of Exodus — the marvel of ages, it 
appears to me — we have an ideal of a more perfect character 
than is given anywhere else. It is glanced at in the prophets. 
it is glanced at in some of the Psalms from the standpoint of 
experience ; but here it is enunciated, and in detail : " The 
Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and 
proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by 
before him, and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful 
and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and 
truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and 
transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the 
guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, 
and upon the children's children, unto the third and fourth gene- 
ration." What is the interpretation of that? "I am not a 
God that is careless of the moral character of mankind, I am 
not a mere sentimental God ; I believe that men are to live in 
great elemental lines of integrity. I shall never forget, under 
any circumstances, what I mean mankind to reach up unto. 
Obedience to God's laws is obedience to God Himself, and I 
will never give that up ; I will never lose my fidelity in making 
men that violate my law feel that they are out of the way ; I 
will punish them, they shall suffer." Pain in this world and 
suffering are God's merciful ministers to keep men in the road ; 
they are the thorns of the hedge that save a man from toppling 
over the precipice on the other side, and the scratch is salva- 
tion. " So," says God, " I will by no means count it a matter 
of indifference whether a man lives right or wrong. He shall 
live right or he shall suffer, because I am a God of mercy and 



Divine Compassion. S9 

love.'' But before He says all that, in wonderful mercy He 
puts first the benign elements of character, and says, " The 
Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, abundant in 
goodness and truth.'' There was the heathenism that was 
telling about demons damned or that wanted to damn men ; 
there were all forms of murky idolatry, of hideous and gro- 
tesque representations of the powers in the air, in the water 
under the earth and above the earth, the hideous conception 
of God as a maw that ate up everything to please Himself and 
cared to give nothing to anybody else but His leavings. That 
was the heathen conception of the Divine nature, and there- 
fore God opens this solemn chant of the wilderness by saying, 
"lam merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abundant in good- 
ness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, 
transgression, and sin" — a threefold designation that there may 
be nothing outside of it. " I forgive everything, and yet will 
by no means clear the guilty. I do not forget it because I am 
indifferent to it ; I hold to the integrity of men but in admini- 
stering this rigorous law, the requisition of God that man shall 
cease to be an animal, that he shall climb up into the social 
element, and that he shall reach higher into the moral element 
— yea, that he shall come out at the very top into the spiritual 
element that unites him to God and the great invisible host — 
in the administration of this justice I will be long-suffering, 
patient, and infinite in goodness." 

So the Old Testament had a sublime conception of God ; 
but when you come down to the prophets, when they were 
denouncing men-stealers, murderers, thieves, robbers ; when 
lust immeasurable, the universal Slough of Despond in this 
world, threatened to overwhelm society, when religion itself 
dedicated harlotry in the temples, when the great curse of 
idolatry was licentiousness, then God says: " I will not relax 
one particle of my eternal law — not of the letter, but of the 
nature, and of the organised human body ; I will hold to that ; 
men shall become more than animals ; but I will administer 
that in patience and long-suffering and gentleness, and where 
infirmity and weakness turn men this way and that way I will 
wait for them, I will wait till the crooked grows straight, till the 
inferior is exalted, I will have compassion on men ; when they 
are transgressing their own nature and My moral law and all 
things pure and holy, I will still have patience, that I may 
bring them back again." There is the ideal of the Old Testa- 
ment. But coming down to a later period, when men were 



9<d Divine Compassion. 

brutal they needed a little thunder, and the prophets gave it to 
them. They developed the regent character of God. "I abhor 
wickedness, and My fury shall burn to the lowest hell, I will 
not tolerate it ; I have not built the world for this : wicked 
men and devils shall not desecrate it ; I will put forth a hand 
of strength, and I will clothe Myself in garments of blood ! I 
will walk forth so that the land shall tremble in My indignation; 
wickedness shall not prevail ; purity in manhood and Divine 
excellence shall prevail." And so the thunder of God's justice 
and the threatenings of God's law were sounded out continually 
because men were on so low a plane that they needed just that 
development of the Divine nature that should meet their con- 
ditions and circumstances. 

In a rude way that is very much what you will see in our 
gaols and courts of justice. Here comes a man that has been 
a robber, a house-breaker, a sneak-thief full of all sorts of 
evasions and dissipations. See how the constable treats him. 
" Come here, you fellow ! Step in there ! Get out of the 
way ! " And down he pushes him. He does not treat the 
man like a gentleman ; he is not a gentleman, he is no better 
than a brute beast ; he beats his wife at home, and he lies 
faster than a horse can trot ; he is a miserable wretch ; every- 
thing has been tried with him and it is no use. Then there 
comes in a woman who, in the poverty of the family and in 
the hopelessness of hunger, has stolen a loaf of bread and has 
been arraigned before the Courts. Tears are running down 
her cheeks, and you see the very constable himself pull out 
his cotton snub of a handkerchief and rub his cheeks down. 
"Sit down, ma'am, please," says he. She is the victim of law 
broken, to be sure ; but justice treats her much more delicately, 
much more kindly than it does the old arrant and oft-convicted 
criminal. So in the revelation of God's law and God's govern- 
ment to men : the men that need thunder get it. 

But that has given a disproportionate idea of God's cha- 
racter. Men have been taught that He is the implacable 
thunderer. Another reason is that it is easier for us to thundei 
than it is to love. It is a great deal easier for a minister to 
preach hell-fire and damnation and a God implacable, and 
men elect, and all this, that, and the other. It runs with the 
animal nature exactly, and it has had a good time in this world 
or, rather, a bad time — but it was relative to the age and con- 
dition of the unfolding series of eternity. So, little by little, 
in flashes out of the great inspired heart of the loving David, 



.Divine Compassion. 91 

higher conceptions of God begin to be developed ; and the 
prophets that were the sublime statesmen of the wilderness 
when they were denouncing oppression and mis-government 
and the treading under foot of the poor, set over against the 
terrible denunciations and light up the sky with their descrip- 
tions of the beauty of holiness. 

But it was not until the sun rose at the advent that there 
came a moaning outburst that gave us sight, not of the 
administration of God's government among men, but of the 
heart of God Himself in Jesus Christ. There we see the 
inside of God ; and what was that ? If Calvary does not 
teach it, if His walk among the poor and needy does not teach 
it, if all the acts of mercy do not inspire you with the know- 
ledge, if you need it shaped into a doctrine, then hear it here. 
He represents that the inner nature of God, as represented by 
Jesus Christ, acting in place of the high priest, was one that 
could " have compassion on the ignorant and on those that are 
out of the way " — all error, all stumbling, all sin, all violation 
of the ideal of duty. We have in God One that has compas- 
sion, One that does not get up, and, contracting his savage 
brow, look out and say : " Where are you wretches ? " but One 
who looks upon the earth as a loving doctor looks at the 
households of the neighbouring families, and says: "Who is 
sick? who needs medicine? who needs nursing? who needs 
helping " He has compassion on those that are out of the 
way. The infinite bounty of Divine love is not savage nor 
partial, it is universal, it is intense beyond description. What 
is infinite ? That beyond which the thought of man cannot 
go ; that that has to our thought no boundary, extent beyond 
ending. What is infinite compassion ? That that would wrap 
this globe round and round a thousand times, like the folds of 
a garment round the body, with Divine thoughtfulness, Divine- 
mercy, Divine love. What is infinite love? What is a 
mother's love ? The purest and sweetest and tenderest thing 
that is known on earth is the overhanging heart of a mother 
upon the cradle that has in it that little nothing which we call 
a babe, that can give nothing back, that receives everything 
and returns nothing. Yet the love of the mother is but one 
drop of the ocean as compared with the love of the great 
Father of mankind — infinite, infinite ! 

And if this is the open door by which Christ has made 
known to us the interior disposition of our God, well may it be 
said : " Come boldly to the throne of grace to ob f ;^in mercy." 



92 Divine Compassion. 

No suppliant at the foot of God's throne was ever rejected, no 
marking down of men's sins rises up before you. Who finds 
God finds the balmy air that is breaking down the winter, 
bringing back the bird, with the breaking forth of grain and 
herb and blossom and the whole smell of summer. God 
knows just how bad you are ; He knows what you meant to 
do and did not, He knows what you did and covered up with 
pretences. There is not a sore or a pimple or a blotch or a 
pain or a wound of the heart of man that he is not more 
familiar with than you are — a great deal more. He is never 
sorry that He took anybody that went to Him. Nobody can 
go in prayer and say : " Lord, when I gave myself to Thee, 
and believed that I received a token of forgiveness, I was not 
sincere, you did not know what you had taken." " Naked and 
open are all of us before Him with whom we have to do." 
And when He took a sinner He knew all the possibilities of 
the future, and He stands to the covenant of love and will 
never depart from it — never. 

After this brief exposition let me make some special points. 
And first, I. wish to say a word on the Divinity of Jesus Christ 
as the interpreter of God. People have asked me : " Do you 
believe in the divinity of Christ ? " I do not believe in anything 
else ; it is the sum of my belief, it is the whole orb of my life. 
Without it my anchor would part from the cable and go to the 
bottom of the sea, and I should be tossed on the restless 
waves of unbelief and uncertainty if you took away from me the 
faith that Christ interprets God, and is God, just as far as it is 
possible to clothe Divinity in mortal bodies, and to subject the 
Infinite to all the necessities of time and matter. But in 
regard to everything that is in character, quality, like God, of 
God. Christ was, I might say, in prison. When you go to a 
mission school or a ragged school, you leave the best part of 
yourself at home. They do not understand how you are obliged 
to go down to the limit of their understanding, and express 
the lower forms of your own knowledge and help them along 
by images and figures. And when you have had a child for a 
year he does not understand you yet ; you are a thousand 
times higher than he is ; it is because he is so low that he can- 
not creep up into the realms that you are in. And God is so 
infinite, and in quality so exquisite, that He could only be 
known by a representation of Himself, and He took out from 
the bosom of His love His Son Jesus. Here questions begin 
to arise, vny number of them — doubts, difficulties. If you 



Divine Compassion. 93 

undertake to solve the philosophy of Divine Government you 
have eternity before you to do it in, and even then you are a 
fool. Christ represents God and is Divine. He came forth 
into this world, not merely to make declarations of truth, but to 
live them ; to put them into the form of conduct, so that wher- 
ever He went men looking on Him might say : " This is the 
interpretation." He is this and a great deal more. It is not 
that He is less. He is more — more tender to the fallen sinner 
that sheds tears upon His feet, more tender than any concep- 
tion you can have. Ah, for a long time it was a puzzle to me 
what Christ would mean when Mary met Him in the Garden 
and thought that He was the gardener, and said : " They have 
taken away my Lord ; tell me where they have laid Him and I 
will take Him away." What dramatic force there is in what 
follows : " Jesus said unto her : Mary." That word thrilled 
her soul. It was a word of love that she knew the meaning of, 
and she said : "My Lord and my God." "Touch me not," 
said He. Why should she not touch Him ? " I am not yet 
ascended to My Father and yours. I am not God ; I am a mere 
frame in which the Divine element is. You must not think 
that God is as small as I am and as imperfect. God is a Spirit 
— your thoughts must be larger than this. When you worship 
Me I shall have ascended, and there, in the full glory and full 
outflow of My nature no human arm can clasp Me. Do not 
worship Me, the man-frame, but Me, the Infinite, the Eternal 
Love." It was not rebuke, it was merely saying : " I am more 
than you think Me. Do not begin yet. By faith lift up your 
thought to the sphere of eternal being and life." And so, when 
a man comes to me and says : " Do you believe that Christ 
was a member of the Trinity?" I say : " I have no objection. '* 
" But what do you do with this text or that text if you do not 
believe it ? " Then they have a sum in arithmetic for me. 
Well, I say: " I take it, and believe it — do not cipher forme."' 
" Well, do you understand it ? '' "I do not understand it, and 
if I did not take anything that I did not understand, I should 
be very poor indeed.'' That is the face of Scripture, and I 
see no objection to it ; it does not give me any trouble. 
But when you come round with your mechanical god and say : 
" There is this wheel, and that wheel, and that wheel, and 
those three are one, and this is the machine we are preaching 
about, God in three forms and Jesus Christ one of them. 
Do you believe in that ? " I sav you have there the bare bones 



94 Divine Compassion. 

of theology ; that is not my idea either of the Father, or of the 
Son, or of the Holy Spirit. I do not measure my God, as you 
do, by outwardness, but by the substance of the inward life, by 
wisdom, by love, and all the fruit of love ; and if Jesus Christ 
is not of the nature of God, then I have lost all conception of 
what that can possibly be. He represents to me the very 
highest attribute of God. I do not count the stilling of the 
waves as being so very Divine, or if it is it is the little finger of 
God ; but when Jesus Christ can suffer that other men might 
not suffer ; when He developed the idea that God's nature was 
that of one who had rather that He should Himself take the 
bondage and burden, when He showed paternal feeling beyond 
father and mother, that had rather suffer in the family than 
that the child should suffer, then I begin to say : " Here is 
love; here is light." If the questions that I would fain pro- 
pose are not questions to be solved — namely, how He could 
be God and yet man — I remit those questions to theology ; 
and to a very large extent theology is the vast abyss into which 
men throw things that they cannot deal with in any other way. 
To me Jesus is the exposition outwardly of the inward life of 
God, and I follow Him everywhere on earth, and I say: 
" This is God, this is God, and this is God," and I free from 
my thoughts as one frees a weight from the soul, I free the 
earthly circumstances of Christ's life. And then I say : " This 
is the trait, this is the quality, this is the Divine nature "; and 
then I enthrone it in the Father, I enthrone it in the Holy 
Ghost, and the whole earth doth show forth what the centre of 
the universe is. Yes : I believe in the Divinity of Christ 
because I believe in God, and because in Him alone can I 
gain any adequate conception of what is the sum and centre of 
God Himself. One day a gipsy band wandering through 
England saw a little child that was a duke's. They stole him 
and carried him off to the Continent, where he was brought up 
amongst the original tribe as a gipsy. They taught him horse- 
manship, arrowship, and stealingship, and all sorts of wild things. 
But he had his mother's blood in him, and though he learned 
these things with facility, there was always something in him 
throbbing, throbbing, throbbing. A traveller in that region, 
at last, seeing him, and having commerce with some of the 
gipsy women, learned that the child was brought from England. 
" I knew it," he said ; " I know that family. They lost a child, 
and I see the lineaments of his father and his mother now 
What will you take for the child?" At last, after various 



Divine Compassion. 95 

negotiations, he bought the child out of his bondage and dis- 
closed to him his position. "You are the son of a duke ; your 
father has an estate — one of the most royal in all England. 
What do you think? I will show you what England is." He 
then took him with him, and he said : " When you get home 
you will be arrayed in royal garments — purple, and fine linen, 
and scarlet ; and you have such a father ! and, oh ! such a 
mother ! They have been longing to see you for years." He 
took the child to England, and in order to give him some 
idea of the country and its greatness he showed him 
a fleet of men-of-war lying in the harbour. The child 
said : " Oh my ! I now begin to understand what Eng- 
land must be. This, you say, is her fleet?" "A portion 
of it. There is no harbour in the globe where the royal flag 
does not float." " Oh, I never saw so many ships as these, 
and what wonderful ships ! " Then the drum was heard roll- 
ing out from the fort. "What is that?" said the child. 
"That is the band of the army." "Oh, an army;" Then 
he stood on parade and saw the soldiers, and witnessed the 
wonderful mechanism of their drill, and he said : " Why, on 
land and water this is England, is it? '' "Yes, this is Eng- 
land's power on land and water, but it is not England; England 
is something else." Then the child takes a journey ; he rides 
through the beautiful country with hedges and trees, and 
walled in gardens (Selfishness) ; he sees all the beautiful 
things of the landscape, and he says : " Now I begin to under- 
stand what it is." Yes; he begins. Then after a day's travel 
he draws near to the park, and the old castle and mansion. 
Other thoughts then begin to develop in him, and he says : 
" Is this where my father and mother live?" "Yes ; this is 
where they live." And he goes with a spirit of wonder, sur- 
prise, marvel, through the winding path, down through the 
glade, up over the turf of the swelling lawn, and at last he says : 
" Is this my home? Am I going to have all this in such a 
beautiful country as this, such a wonderful nation ? " "Yes ; 
all that, all that." Let me not desecrate by any attempt to 
describe the outcoming of the mother, whose tears are only 
hers, and of the father, who, with almost a rigour of excitement, 
crushes him in his arms. The boy looks up and says : "Are 
you my father? are you my mother? Now," he says, "I 
do know what father and mother mean." No you don't, my 
boy ; no you don't. W T hen you shall have lived there a month'; 
when you shall have lived there six months ; when the inward 



g6 Divine Compassion. 

love of your mother begins in ten thousand ways of sweetness 
by morning, noon, and night, to throw itself over you ; when 
you shall see the honour, the sensibility, the purity, the courage, 
and the grand noble manhood of your father ; when you have 
lived five years with them, then you will just begin to under- 
stand what it is to be a son, and to have such parents. 

We go wandering through the world with the outward and 
the lowest elements, and we go to the civilised part of the globe 
and take the elements that build up exterior kingdoms and ad- 
vance commerce and science ; we go on to the outskirts of the 
Church, and if we are fortunate enough not to get into one 
of those Babel churches, full of clamour and wrath, we begin 
to have the sweet story of Jesus told; but not until Jesus 
Christ is revealed to us as the interior heart of God, and we 
can lift up our eyes, and out of our own experience begin to 
feel "the love of God which passeth understanding," can we 
have any adequate conception of what it is to have Jesus to 
introduce us to our home, and to our Father, and to our son- 
ship. Do you ask me, on any mere mosaic of texts, or any 
miserable doubts of one-footed philosophy, to throw Him 
away and to say : " I do not believe in the Divinity of Christ? " 
He is my all ; whom have I in heaven but Him ? and there is 
none upon earth that I desire beside Him. 

I remark, secondly, that such a view of the central and 
dominant compassion of God to such a race as this is the 
only view that can be adapted to the history and condition of 
mankind. The old theories of the appearance of men upon 
earth, and the arbitrariness by which they had been neglected 
and doomed, seem to me to issue from the very pit of per- 
dition. There is no account yet that can closely explain the 
facts of the appearance of mankind in this world, and of 
the slow development of the Divine economy amongst man- 
kind. Why they should have been spread out through ages 
without light, without a sanctuary, without a Bible, without 
a ministry, without a Redeemer made known in Jesus Christ, 
who can tell ? God can by and by, and I wait for Him to tell 
me. All my philosophy falls rhort. How can you explain 
the providence of God in regard to nations as they stand ? 
There is that continent of Africa that is overflowing with 
children, her tens of millions, yet so dark that if Africa were 
sunk to day to the bottom of the sea, with the exception of a 
few that have been imported into it, the population might go 
down, and they would be no more loss to the world than the 



Divine Compassion. 97 

bubbles that would come to the top afterwards — not a machine, 
not an invention, not a discovery, not a philosophy, not a 
work of any kind, not an institution of civil life. You might 
sink all Africa to the bottom of the sea, and the world would 
not lose as much as one mechanic hand in the city of 
London. How are you going to explain that in the Divine 
economy ? Then look at Asia, hardly better : look at the isles 
of the sea. God's ways are strange and mysterious, I cannot 
explain them ; but I believe they are explainable when we 
shall have come to a higher point of view. At present, I say 
this : I believe that God is a God of compassion ; that He is 
working out a problem in which this world is not alone con- 
cerned ; and that when we shall rise to the eternity in which 
His throne is and are eclaircised, delivered from the bondage 
of the flesh and all the interpretations which it gives to our 
spiritual life, I believe the fair fabric of the universe will rise 
before us with wonder. 

Come with me, if you please, to an organ factory. I will 
suppose that we are ignorant of it entirely, and we are told 
that this is where the grandest musical instrument in the world 
is manufactured. We go into the factory, and what do we 
see ? Slabs of seasoned timber, all sorts of mechanical work 
going on, harsh sawing, sharp filing, pounding, hammering. 
I say : " Is this the place where they have found out music ? 
Is this the place where they build organs, which you say .are 
the very royal instruments of music ? " Then we go in and 
see the metals being rolled out, and shaped, and hammered. 
The men are twisting them, as they always do, and one pipe 
represents, we will say, the wald flute, and another represents 
the ordinary fife, and so on. They put them in one by one, 
and all that you hear is — [Mr. Beecher imitated the tone of 
the organ pipe.] They then take the tuning fork to see that 
it is of the right pitch and the right tone, and all day long you 
hear squawking and all sorts of sounds, and they tell you they 
are manufacturing music ; and, heavens ! what "music i At 
last we go away, and I say what men say about the Church — 
it is a shame, it is a mere pretence. But one day as I stroll 
by a cathedral I step in ; they have just had a new organ built, 
and some great interpreter of Beethoven is at the keyboard, 
and I hear that under-roll of thunder out of which rises up, 
all harmonious and all exquisite, tones that represent the birds 
of the air, and every other musical instrument in the world. 
The theme lifts me up, and as the sound rolls away through 

S 



q 8 Divine Compassion. 

the vast arches I am entranced. A man says to me : il That is 
the organ, now it is complete ; when you saw it building part 
by part, step by step, and pipe by pipe, it looked to you like 
anything on earth but a good musical instrument ; you were 
fooled, you judged on the whole by parts that were in process 
of development." When God shall have given tone to every 
stop of human nature, when the work of redemption shall have 
been completed, when all the outlying elements shall have been 
brought together into their relative positions, when God Him- 
self shall sit at the keyboard and roll forth the song of redemp- 
tion, then men will know that all their doubts and fears and 
disgust in this world were both unphilosophical and miserably 
mistaken. May we live to see that great redemption day when 
God harmonises all the scattered elements of the experimental 
life on this earth, and doubtless in other worlds. 

I remark once more, if I am not tiring you, that science and 
true faith are, on the present plane, not to be reconciled. 
Science is knowledge gathered by the senses from matter, and 
it will not go any further than matter ; but faith is the con- 
clusions that are come to by the inward man, through his 
emotions and moral intuitions. Science builds a man clear up 
to the body, then a man's own heart, experience, and his moral 
intuitions, go on and represent to him the troubles that are 
higher than anything belonging to the body, they do not 
disown them, they are true up to that point ; but there is 
something higher, more ineffable, invisible, eternal. When 
death has wrecked the body, it does not touch the soul ; that 
lives and goes on. So long as science insists upon it, that 
nothing is true except that which the senses interpret, the soul 
stands a protestant and says : " Science has only touched the 
bottom, not the top,'' and out of the revelations of a man's 
own experience, when he is stimulated by opening himself to 
the influence of God, and there is brought out of Him the 
knowledge of the Holy Ghost, the inspiration that calls upon 
God's people, and upon all of them without exception, so soon 
as they open themselves to the light of God and the presence 
of God ; then there is a kingdom that science has not yet 
meddled with. I believe in the progress of science, and in 
the elements that have been demonstrated. I am an evolu- 
tionist ; but I am an evolutionist who feels that up to the 
present point of time there have been evolved simply the lower 
factors of truth, and that the greater truths are yet to come. 
God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, redemption, revelation, sanctifi- 



Divine Compassion. 99 

cation, final salvation as yet have not been touched — not by 
science ; and you know more about them, you that are sancti- 
fied, you that are called, having a life though in the flesh, yet 
a life, as it is, in Christ Jesus — you know more than the 
proudest savant in the world, not of the systematic whole, but 
of so much as has been struck like the melody of a harp in 
the chords of your heart. 

Now this is to me an unspeakable comfort. I, that have 
wandered much in doubt and fears and strugglings against the 
old and seeking to find the new ; I, that have touched the 
depths of infidelity ; I, that have been cast away upon the 
barren land of Atheism ; I, that with the bats and owls have 
studied astronomy, and seen only what they see in Agnosti- 
cism — I have been emancipated and lifted out of all my 
troubles. I do know that whatever else changes and 
passes away, whatever phenomena there may be in life, what- 
ever strange moral questions as to the way in which God has 
done what He has done, and neglected what He has neglected, 
this one truth stands like the sun in the heavens, and will have 
a thousand years without going down. When I have broken 
through the outwardness of the universe, and when I come to 
see Him as He is, I shall find that love and compassion are 
at the centre of wisdom, and one day I can join with that 
great throng that says: "Thou art worthy to receive pow r er 
and honour and glory and dominion." He is worthy, and 
when I shall see Him I shall be like Him, and be satisfied. 

my soul ; thou hast never been satisfied yet. The 
hunger is greater than the food. I have not been able in any 
direction to feel that I was full. But there comes a day when 

1 shall see my God, and He will not be untoward or dreadful ; 
I shall see Him as He is, and I shall be satisfied. 

Dearly beloved, to whom I speak for the first time — and, 
probably, for the last, most of you — the words of God's oracles, 
never be discouraged. Greater is He that is for you than they 
that are against you. Whether you love God or not, God loves 
you ; He does not love your sin, He is the physician of your 
soul. Physicians do not love ulcers nor excisions. God loves 
you j if you have no other friend in the wilderness, nor in the 
city, nor anywhere else, you have one : God is your friend. 
You have done wrong, God knows it, and He forgives it. You 
know that you are not yet stable, you know that your promises 
made yesterday will be broken to-day, and that your promises 
made to-day will be broken to-morrow. God knew it before 



ioo Divine Compassion. 

you did, but He is still your friend. He will never leave nor 
forsake those that put their trust in Him. Come light, come 
darkness, come weakness, come strength, come life, come 
death, ye are God's, and God will not forsake His own. 

And need I call others ? Ye that are not children of faith, 
-e that are without God and without hope in the world, I do 
/iot ask you to worship a grim demon ; I do not ask you to 
worship an impossible theological God ; I ask you to worship the 
Lord Jehovah, the God of love and mercy who, with patience 
and long-suffering, bears your infirmities and carries your sins. 
God is the all-helpful and the all-beautiful, the all-patient, better 
than father or mother. I ask you. ought you not to know such 
a friend, and ought not love in Him to beget love in you ? It 
is not too late to begin if the grey hairs begin to look like 
gravestones on your head, it is not too late to begin 
though you are embosomed and embarrassed in the 
business of life ; it is not too soon to begin though 
you are young and fresh. God is joy ! God is brightness ! God 
is liberty ! God is love ! And you owe yourselves to God. I 
hear them calling from heaven that were like you, and saying 
" Come, and let him that heareth say Come, and let every one 
that is athirst come, and take of the water of life freely." Lord 
Jesus we come. Oh ! descend and look upon this congrega- 
tion and open the understandings of Thy servants before Thee 
and fill them with admiration of the pitifulness of Thy love and 
the helpfulness of Thy counsel. Oh ! let no one seek in selfish- 
ness and in folly to cheat his God, and sow to the flesh that he 
may Teap corruption, but rather may he sow to the spirit and 
leap life everlasting. 



LIBERTY BY BONDAGE. 



" Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me ; for I am 
meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For 
My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." — Matt. xi. 28 — 30. 

IT was in the midst of one of the most troublous periods of 
human history that Christ spake these words. The 
Jewish people, overrun by foreign despotism, all in a flutter of 
vain expectation at the coming of their earthly Messiah ; many 
of them famishing with hunger, many of them trodden down 
by the iron heel of oppression — the whole people agitated, 
inflammable, restless, were around about Him. The cruel 
Herod, with his schemes of domination, was all abroad in the 
land, and everything conceivable was happening, except 
restfulness. There was no rest, except in the grave, for the 
people to whom He spake. Jerusalem was full of schemers ; 
ambition was rioting ; avarice burned night and day ; all lusts 
and all passions were, as from a volcano, pouring out their lava ; 
and in the presence of this universal agitation and disturbance 
the voxe was heard : " Come to Me, and ye shall find rest." 

Who come ? All. The crowned head, the courtier, the 
man of pleasure, the ambitious schemer for gain, the priest, 
the Pharisee, the Sadducee, the thief, the harlot, everybody — 
the bereaved, the mourners, the young, the old. " Come unto 
Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden." This invitation, 
first sounded then, has never died out of the world. It is the 



102 Liberty by Bondage. 

voice of God to-day, and to every human creature ; to every 
one that is in trouble or in sorrow, in darkness or in disappoint- 
ment : "Come unto Me, come unto Me." 

Is there no deception in this ? Has God a provision for 
everybody? Are there no degrees to bar up the way? Is 
there no impossible condition ? Is it not rather a voice sweet 
to the ear, but in fulfilment utterly beyond the reach of man ? 
Is there provision for rest in this restless world ? We have 
known what scheming men have done to lure their fellow-men 
with fair pretence and false purpose ; we have read in advertise- 
ments of quacks how that some remedy has at last been found 
out that may cure murderous diseases, and it is offered to all 
that want it freely upon application, and when application is 
made to them the answer comes back : " This remedy is a 
deadly poison unless administered as I prescribe ; it cannot be 
obtained of the apothecary, it is dangerous even at the hands 
of ordinary physicians ; but let any one enclose to me a pound 
note and I will send him the genuine article, and it shall answer 
the promise made in the advertisement." Alas for those that 
have not a shilling ! And so it is quite possible that one 
might hold out promises to the ear that when you search into 
them will be false to expectation and to hope. Is this one of 
such? The Word of God is yea and amen ; it was never 
broken. Whoever teaches that God makes a pretence of 
saving men while He knows that He will not save them is 
worse than dishonest — he is a blasphemer ; for if we may not 
trust in simplicity the word of the Lord, where may we plant 
our trust and who maybe believed? 

Well, what is this promised rest then ? What is rest as in 
the context ? It is not simply sleep, it is not simply the cessa- 
tion of pain ; rest from struggle, from fear, from pain and dis- 
turbance of soul. The fruit of the spirit, we are told other- 
where, is love, joy, peace. Now, peace is not mere quies- 
cence ; it is that condition of mind in which all legitimate 
faculties are harmonious with each other, and are impleted and 
receiving their appropriate food and nourishment ; it is the con- 
tentment of the whole soul, the peace of God. And the rest 
that it promises is the rest which comes to agitated human 
nature in fears, in trembling hopes, in all aspirations, in all 
desires lawful or unlawful, in that whole coming and going of 



Liberty by Bondage. 103 

the tides of human passion ; for men are shivering like the 
leaves of trees in a storm, and when the storm is overpast they 
rest and are quiet. Men are cast about as the waves cast the 
ship about, and when the storm is over on the sea the ship is 
at rest again. And the soul of man is agitated with ten 
thousand emotions, few of which bring satisfaction, and 
when, at last, every part of the soul is filled with its appro- 
priate nourishment and need there is no more murmur, there 
is no more complaint. When the little child is hungry, and 
the long day has tired it out, it cries and frets, and no chair is 
easy, and no place good but its mother's arms, and then 
resting on her bosom it draws supplies from her life, and little 
by little the thirst and the hunger are slaked, and it falls off, 
and in the sweetest tones that earth ever hears gurgles its little 
joy and is at rest. So when one comes to the Lord Jesus 
Christ, there in His arms He has the food of the soul, and 
whatever may have been the days of labour or the days of 
sorrow, there is with Jesus Christ rest, soul rest. 

Now, what are the conditions of this rest ? There are no 
conditions for the season. Nobody need pray that January 
may come — January is coming anyhow ; nobody need in 
January pray for June — June is on the way ; nobody need pray 
for the sun — the sun is not blotted out ; it comes of itself; no 
one need pray for the things that are established ; but there are 
some things that are conditioned, and man's instrumentality is 
indispensable to the procurement of them. 

" Take My yoke upon you ; learn of Me.'' Learn what ? 
What is this yoke and this burden ? It is an agricultural figure. 
All the qualities of the wild steed count for nothing until he has 
learned to bear harness ; he may have speed, but he has no 
application to the industries of life until he is broken in. The 
harness may seem to him to be an encumbrance at first ; after- 
wards it is the very means by which he applies his strength. 
His value lies in that as a draught animal. And the heifers 
upon the pasture may be good for the coming market, but to 
plough withal, and to haul the wain, they have got to learn to be 
yoked. When first the yoke comes on to their neck it galls 
them, it may be ; but, little by little, the neck becomes hard, and 
the yoke is easy, and the cattle are all the stronger for having it 
upon them. So it is that Christ says to us: "Take My yoke. 



104 Liberty by Bondage. 

My burden," and later on : " My yoke is easy" — My conditions 
— " My burden is light." When once it has been taken up, and 
we have accustomed ourselves to it, both the yoke and the burden 
are easy and are light. Our strength, then, is not our natural 
wild strength ; it is not for a man, as an animal, to be at rest ; 
and yet we are born animals first. No man, when born, is him- 
self any more than an egg is an eagle when it has been laid in the 
eagle's nest. We are being born for twenty or thirty years little 
by little. Nothing on earth is so. far from itself as a man when 
he is born ; and he is after himself, hunting for himself, and too 
often never finds himself in all the length of his life, for he is 
hunting for the animal man, and that is not the man any more 
than a candlestick is a candle. The manhood lies higher up than 
the passions, the appetites that are the ministers of the body. 
The man lies in reason, in moral sense, in spiritual aspirations 
and qualities, and all that is under them are but the stock on 
which these higher qualities are grafted. 

So, then, the promise here is not the promise of a gift out- 
right ; it is not a gift in any ordinary sense. " Come unto 
Me, and I will give you rest." If He had said, " I will lead 
you into rest," that would have come more nearly to our 
apprehension. What Christ offers to us is a new way of 
living : " Come to Me, and learn of Me ; I will be your 
Teacher ; I will tell you how you shall have perfect rest." 
" Disciple " means, in the original, "scholar." " Come to My 
school ; let Me be your instructor. You are attempting to 
establish joy in this life by methods peculiar to your animal 
conditions ; let Me teach you how to find in true manhood 
that which you fail to find under any other condition ; I will 
tell you how. If you will make Me your Master, and become 
an obedient scholar, I will give you this rest.'' It is not, then, 
a certain something that is let down from heaven. Many a 
man's religion is like his Sunday clothes, which he takes out ot 
the closet very carefully on Sunday morning, puts them on ? 
brushes them all down, and looks at himself in the glass, and 
feels as though he was presentable ; and in his Sunday clothes 
he goes to church, and he sings — oh, how loud! And he 
prays or he groans — oh, how audibly ! And he has a very 
pleasant ear for music, and the sermon pleases him, and he 
goes home, saying ; " How beautiful is religion J " And on 



Liberty by Bondage. 105 

Monday he takes off the coat and hangs it up again, and all 
the other articles, and puts on his worldly clothes, and goes 
about his business. Now, religion is no garment to be 
changed ; it is a state of the soul. It may begin little, but it 
grows, and no man can lay it aside, no man can supersede it 
by anything else. It is education ; it is the reconstruction of 
a man's inward life and nature upon a nobler pattern than any 
that Nature can give us ; and there is no such thing as putting 
it on for this and taking it off for that. It is character. 
Reputation may change, character does not easily; and the 
habits of the soul formed upon everlasting truth and Divine 
influence — that is religion, and it does not come in a day, it 
does not come in the flesh. " Work out your own salvation, 
for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do of His 
good pleasure." So, then, all ideas that a man may be a 
wicked man up to a precise moment, and then, when the 
clock strikes twelve, a flash comes out, and he is converted, 
and he is all made over — no, no, no, no ! I may say 
with perfect confidence that when the birds come from 
the South in eaily April, summer is coming — the precursors 
are here ; the air is balmy ; now then for the garden ; now 
then for the farm ; now then, go to work, husbandman ; gar- 
dener, go to work. But the summer has not come. But the 
grass is springing, the flowers are peeping out — yes, bright 
heralds of the coming day. Seeds are coming up ; truly all is 
right. But no man ever saw in the middle of March, rounded 
out and leaping forth, a whole summer with its grandeur and 
all its fruits. They come little by little. Religion may but have 
a beginning at any hour or under any condition. It is by a 
beginning; it is the start; for a true religion is one beginning 
as a grain of mustard-seed, the smallest of all seeds, yet grows 
and spreads itself. And to the dying day the man is not yet 
truly and perfectly religious ; there is more to come out — so 
much more that the world is not fit for him any longer, and 
God takes him into a higher climate and into a nobler garden. 
It is putting on the harness, then ; it is, in other words, 
developing in each man an educated and new life ; subduing 
the primary tendencies of human nature and obliging them to 
conform to higher and nobler purposes. 

It is not peculiar to religion. Religion is the grandest 



106 Liberty Oy jyandage. 

development of that principle that runs through human nature. 
How free the hand is of the lad that is to be a musician ! 
But when he goes to his master to be taught the violin all 
that freedom is gone ; he must hold his hand in a particular 
way; his fingers get cramped; and his arm, though it could 
be moved easily enough at bat and bail, yet must be drawn in 
a particular way, and the muscles ache while he works it in 
and out to become a musician ; and it is not until weeks and 
months have gone by him that he begins to find the new 
method is easier than the old liberty was. 

It is the same with the hand at the piano at the beginning ; 
but by-and-by a few passages can be performed with some 
mechanical awkwardness, as everybody that lives in your neigh- 
bourhood knows; but, little by little, this bondage of the 
hand, this attempt to carry the eye from the score to the keys, 
becomes easier : little by little the way becomes shorter, and 
after years of practice the man thinks with his hand and ex- 
presses his feelings with his hands and glides over it with a 
facility quicker than the bird's wing in the air ; but he went to 
this liberty through bondage. When a child is asked to enjoy 
the sweets of literature he has still to stumble through his 
alphabet, and then he learns to spell, and then he learns, with 
finger on the line, to read ; and little by little he learns so that 
he can read rapidly, and at last he forgets that there are any 
words ; he reads mainly as it were in the air. One of the most 
astonishing things is the development of that power by which a 
man carries thought and feeling in his mind as over against 
those blind signals and symbols of thought and of feeling 
without knowing that he is reading ; he is thinking ; but in 
the beginning how much it cost him to learn it ! So, too, men 
learn mathematics, arithmetic. At first it is hard; little by 
little familiarity accustoms us to it. So, too, it is with the 
compositor at the type-fount. He stops and looks for each 
letter, and hardly knows how to read it bottom-side up ; but 
see him after he has been a year or two at it, if he be deft of 
hand and skilful of eye, how fast he makes the nicked type to 
fly from case to stick, and scarcely knows that he is setting up, 
so easy does it become. The way of liberty is through bondage. 
And it is more even than that. There is nothing that so much 
?ifts a man up in the direction of light and knowledge and 



Liberty oy Bondage. 107 

facility in any of the sciences or any of the arts, as to compress 
him, to compel him to sacrifice himself in order to learn this 
new and higher way. But that is not all. A man is in and of 
himself very weak ; he perishes before the moth ; a mote may 
inflame the eye ; a dropping brick may end the whole tragedy 
of life ; a stumble may precipitate a man to his death. No 
man can command himself. We are on every side subject to 
great laws; laws of nature, material laws. The earth, the 
stone, the clay, all the seasons, water, fire, are our masters ; 
we learn their nature and do obedience to them • and so we 
have our liberty in their midst. A man is free just in propor- 
tion to the number of natural or social laws that he has learned 
to obey. For a man is of himself very little ; but he has learnt 
the courses of God in Nature and employs them, and he rides 
upon the sea or by steam upon land, and goes swifter than the 
bird ; but in every case it is because he has rendered himself 
subject to some or many natural laws. Instead of liberty 
consisting in an unharnessed freedom, liberty consists, in its 
largest estate and greatest variety, in obedience to the greatest 
number of social, moral, and civil laws. " Take My yoke upon 
you, that you may be free ; carry My burden, that you may be 
light." 

It seemed like a mystery at the first, but when we begin to 
analyse the conditions of human life, and see how profound 
this philosophy is of our Saviour's utterance — obedience — then 
the law is the road to liberty. An orchestral band is gathered 
together : the flute, the hautboy, the trombone, the trumpet, 
the French horn, and the drum, that, like many people, makes 
more noise when it is empty than all the rest do when they are 
full. All these are gathered together, and each one is going 
to amuse itself; and what a cacophony of sound! Hair- 
splitting, heartrending. By-and-by the master comes in, and 
he stops the fife and the piccolo, and reduces them to certain 
rules and measures, and commands the trombone to accord 
itself, and the bassoon to accord itself; and each instrument 
has to be tuned to concert pitch. And then they have to go 
into harmony with each other ; and only when they have been 
deprived of their individuality, and made to conform to the 
rules of music, there rises the overture or the stately march, 
and the old grandeur of music. 



108 Liberty by Bondage, 

So it is in the soul of man, made up of a multitude of 
instruments or faculties, each one seeking to have its own full 
way ; but there has to be that process by which they shall be 
brought into subordination to each other down to some settled 
concert pitch, and then there may come up from the soul the 
song of joy, and there may be expressed the depths and the 
sweetness of rest out of the soul of man. 

Now, who was He that said these things ? Some said He 
was a prophet. What audacious prophet ever dared stand 
before his own age and say, " Come unto me?'' A philo- 
sopher ? He would be the supremest egotist of time that 
dared to say, " Come unto me.'' He may have taught 
what faults there were, and what right wajs or truths there 
were, but here is the Person, Jesus, who subordinates all things 
to His own personality, and He says, " Come to Me, and I 
will teach you ; learn of Me '' — not from Me — " I am meek 
and I am lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls 
if ye will learn of Me." 

Is this a man ? Is this anything else than a Divine Being ? 
It would be the most impudent egotism in anything else. 
But it is sublime. If He came forth from the Father, and was 
co-equal with the Father, to teach man the new life and the 
right way, then He might properly stand and say, "Come to 
Me and I will give you rest ; learn of Me ; I am meek and 
lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 

And now, in view of this exposition, I remark that men are 
born with aptitudes, but no man with education. No man is 
born educated. It is true that the law of heredity makes it 
easier for the children and the children's children to learn. 
The children of musicians are more likely to be musicians than 
the children of those that are without musical talent. If the 
parents and ancestors are skilful, it will be likely to descend ; 
but it is but an aptitude, it is a condition which renders 
education quicker and easier, and no man ever yet was born 
with education. That is an after-training. That our ancestors 
were moral men creates a probability that their posterity will 
be moral ; that they were eminently spiritual creates a 
probability that their posterity will be religious ; and so at the 
start there will be constitutional qualities in every one that 
will make it easier for him to progress, to go quicker, to go 



Liberty by Bo?idage. 109 

more broadly into a true spiritual life. But the work has to 
be begun in every person. You cannot buy it, you cannot 
inherit it, the Church cannot give it to you; it comes not 
with the reading of the eye, nor is the man able to gain it by 
the stroke and force of his will all at once. A Christian life 
may be entered, must be entered, by every man of himself. 
Now, if we begin at the cradle, and rear our children in the 
nurture and admonition of the Lord, they may grow up 
substantially into the ways and commandments of God, and 
when they come to that period of discretion in which they 
can choose for themselves, it is easier for them to choose on 
the basis of moral instruction than it would be if they had 
wandered far from morality. I believe that a man may be a 
robber, and a pirate, and a drunkard, and a gambler, and a 
liar, and a politician, and yet be converted some day. All 
these things are possible with God; but no man can be born 
again from these extremes with the same facility with which 
he would have been born into the kingdom if from his cradle 
he had been trained to right knowledges, to right dispositions, 
to prayer and praise, to faith and to hope. It is an argument 
for fidelity among parents to bring up their children, so that 
when they come to years of discretion the exercise of their 
own will given them by belief in their parents shall create 
the starting-point of the new and higher life which, beginning 
feebly, burns brighter and brighter unto the perfect day. 
When a man defers becoming a Christian deliberately to the 
end of life, saying to himself, " I will get all the pleasure there 
is in life first, and then, at the end of life, I will take a turn 
and save myself" — such a man is a sneak ; he is a cowardly 
fellow, a dishonourable man, and Satan outwits him nine times 
out of ten. The hour of weakness, when the eye is clouded 
and the world is reeling, is not the hour for one to make that 
great vow and dedication of himself and of his powers to God. 
" Ah, but the thief on the cross — he was converted, was he 
not ? " I think he was saved, but I think he had a good many 
awkward years after he got in Paradise before he knew how to 
behave himself even decently, and a man must be low down 
on the scale when he takes a thief for his example. Well, in 
the morning of life Nature is facile ; that is the furrow- time, 
the seed-time. He that would study good manners must not 



no Liberty by Bondage, 

wait till he is sixty years old ; he will be awkward to the end 
if he does. He that would be facile in any science or learning 
should be trained as early as possible to it. This is familiar, 
everyday, common-sense knowledge. Why do not men employ 
it for religion as well as for everything else? Begin early 
before habits are formed ; compel the animal that is in you to 
take the yoke and burden ; harness yourself to your moral 
duties ; learn at the time when a man can with most facility 
learn. Ah ! but youth is dedicated to pleasure. I do not 
blame youth ; the maiden and the young man, I do not blame 
them for loving pleasure. God is the fount of pleasure ; God 
meant the whole world to enjoy ; it is not His will that makes 
unhappiness, except as he is chastising men back to the aban- 
doned paths of obedience. I blame men for eating carrion, 
thinking it is good meat ; I blame men for picking out pleasures 
that perish in the using, when they may have those that endure 
for evermore. If you can have genuine silk, do not wear 
calico; if you can have a real daylight, do not have tallow 
candles. If a man wants to know pleasure, why, that is what 
God wants him to know ; and no man knows pleasure except 
that man that is established on the ground of truth, honour, 
love, patience, gentleness, meekness, fidelity, loyalty, patriotism. 
The whole round of manly qualities brought into contact with 
the basenesses of life — if that does not make a man happy 
he may despair of ever being made happy. How many 
men there are that go grazing like Nebuchadnezzar, go 
back to grass like an animal, thinking to find happiness 
there ! How many there are that try to find it in gam- 
bling, that try to find it in lusts that destroy the soul ! How 
many men are turning backwards and downwards to find joy, 
while the bright orb of joy is over their heads like stars by 
night and suns by day ! I do not object to men seeking happi- 
ness, but I declare that in fidelity, in faith, in trust, in hope 
there is a higher and more continuous happiness than there is in 
any of these by and forgotten ways. And yet there is preva- 
lent among the young oftentimes the feeling that religion is a 
gloomy thing. Then it is not religion. It may be that it may 
lead to religion. Suppose, my friend, you were to go into a 
hospital and say, " Is this a place for bringing men to health ? " 
" Yes ; health is the object that we have in this hospital." 



Liberty by Bondage, in 

" Very good. What is that man limping for on a crutch ? If 
that is health, I do not want it." " No, it may not be health ; 
but it is on the way to health, and the abuse or injury that has 
been done to the man requires a remedy in order to get him 
to health." Now, it may be that men shall pass through sorrows 
on the way to a true Christian experience ; but it is because 
they were out of the way, they are sick, they are lame, they are 
broken, they are already diseased, and religion is the medicine 
to cure them. The young seethe self-denials here and there 
that are leading on to a more glorious liberty, and they say, 
"I do not want religion if that is religion." It is not religion ; 
but it is the medicine that is necessary to bring you to the 
religious experience. I blame those men that teach the young 
that to be Christians means to be stern, unsmiling, except with 
an occasional intermission with your handkerchief to hide it 
from the world. I hold that a true religious life should be one 
that shines ; and when a man has a dark lantern, and puts it 
in his pocket, and goes out shining, it does not help anybody. 
A true Christian man should be the freest, most joyous, up- 
right, frank, most lovable man. I have seen young men 
genial, generous, with their hands open for their companions, 
and everybody loved them ; but they were overtaken by a 
revival, and they have gone into the church, and now they are 
eternally proper ; all liberty is gone and they walk straight, and 
they are awfully pious, and everybody says they are spoiled, and 
I say pretty nearly so, too. I say that cheerful, hopeful, true, 
generous, and noble Christian men and women are the most 
beautiful of all the works of the Gospel of Christ. They are 
the commentary on the New Testament. But the shut-up men 
— I don't blame them, they are all born so — but I blame them 
for setting up their way as the model for others' happiness. 
If a man is born a crow, let him crow ; but if he is born a 
nightingale, let him sing and not crow. 

Now, it is not because religion sets us free from law, it is 
because it brings us under the law, and lifts our thoughts up to 
a higher ideal of life, a nobler conception of duty, and breaks 
us in. Breaks us in ! Yes ; just as we have to be broken in 
to everything else, for no man knows anything until he knows 
it so that he forgets it. When I am sick, and venture out as a 
convalescent, and am very feeble, and watch just where I am 



ri2 Liberty by Bondage. 

going to step l I avoid the little hummock and that sloppy 
place, and I measure my steps according to my strength ; but 
as day in and day out I get well, very soon I do not think 
where I put my steps — I go on and let my feet take care of 
themselves. Now, when a man has every single morning to 
think, " I must be humble to-day," and he is watching out to 
see where he can be humble, he is like the tottering steps of an 
invalid. When a man says, " I suppose I ought to be generous 
on this occasion, but it is hard work ; however, I will be a little/' 
that man is not generous. No man has possession of any quality 
until it is spontaneous in him, until it is automatic, until it acts 
in him and of itself. Now, how many Christians are there in 
the Christian Church that have put on the fruits of the Spirit ? 
— love, until it is no longer a volition, it is an outspring, it 
comes from the man as light from the stars or warmth from 
the sun, and to-day and to-morrow and in the morning and at 
noon, it is himself and he cannot help it, and he does not 
think about it. It is the proper outshining of the man's 
nature. Love ; joy. Now and then men have a little vacation 
in order to have joy ; but the Gospel means that a man shall 
be joyful in the Lord all the time — that is, when under the 
inspiration of the Spirit of God he ought to sing, and the soul 
should be full of joy. Paul had two things he wanted to 
say to his disciples, and so he says: "Rejoice, and again I 
say" — well? — "rejoice." He does not want anything better 
than to repeat that word. Oh, you drudging Christians, 
you men that go bent over with burdens on your back, 
that once in a great while, in a great revival day, get up 
a little bit of joy ; oh, you men that make the children 
think you are sour and acerb ; oh, ye that have not learned 
the alphabet yet of Christianity — joy, peace, not turbulence 
and passion, not yearning even and penitential tears, but 
a settled state of mind in God such that your peace flows 
as a river ! 



There are some persons who, when they come into the 
room where I am, make me feel as if I was on a bed of nettles 
— they worry me and hurt me ; they do not say anything — I 
wish they did — nor do anything — I wish they would go out. 
They are anything on earth but peace-bearers. But I have 
seen the gracious face of holy women so full of life, so full of 



Liberty by Bondage. 113 

rest, and so full of peace that I think I begin to know what 
God's angels are. I have seen them beside the cradle with the 
dying child ; I have heard them say, as the child took its flight, 
"Farewell, my darling, God shall have thee." I have seen 
them in embarrassments and poverty to shine still; I have 
seen them in all the hardest ways of life like their Master, 
" Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, 
despising the shame." And these are Gospel sermons, these 
are walking sermons, these are household sermons, these tell 
children what it is to be Christians ; and when away from their 
Father's house, and scattered over the world, and subject to 
various temptations, and seeing false religions, and hearing all 
sorts of philosophy, they wander from the faith of their child- 
hood, there is one thread that never breaks — " My mother was 
a Christian ; " and by that golden thread, oh ! how many very 
far wandering have been brought back again to the Shepherd 
and Bishop of their souls ! Free, loving, living, shining life is 
God's benediction to any household, and if you could only get 
a church full of them you would have what has never happened 
since Pentecost. It is your bad-living Christians that make 
men doubt whether there is any religion ; for a flaming, joyous, 
modest sweet soul not only no man ever does doubt, but no 
man ever wants to doubt such a soul as that. And if we could 
have any eloquent ministers there, like everybody else subject 
to passions and infirmities, and if w T e could have a whole con- 
gregation, and could stand and look at them in our higher and 
rapturous moods, and say, as the apostle said, "Ye are our 
epistle ; known and read of all men," half the work of evan- 
gelising the globe would be done. It is the poverty of 
Christian experience that makes infidelity ; it is the bad lives of 
Christians that make men doubt whether there are any real 
lives of Christians. 

I remark once more what may be gathered easily from the 
tenor of our foregoing remarks, that a little education in religion 
may be better than nothing ; but a little education does not 
bring forth the full fruit of the Spirit. There are many persons 
that have just enough religion to trouble them ; they have a 
conscience that will not be quiet and is continually condemning 
them. Now, a true religion is like fruit ; when the sun has 
turned the acid juices of it to sweetness the fruit is delicious : 



ii4 Liberty by Bondage. 

but in the early season it is not — it is sour and bitter. There 
are thousands of Christian men and women that are perpetually 
eating green fruit. A little religion is hardly worth your while, be- 
cause you must not depend upon it as a kind of premium paid 
in. Many persons have an idea that religion is a policy of in- 
surance against future fire, and if once they have paid in, why, 
that has settled it, and it will stand. All these illustrations and 
figures are misleading in every way. Religion is character, it 
is permanence in a man's own nature, it is a new life, it is being 
born again and built up on a higher plane ; and when a man 
has just enough education to be fretting because he has no 
more, just enough to keep awake in him his conscience, his 
fears, his dreads, I will not say he had better have none, but I 
will say that he does not know nor can he know what the full 
fruition of God's Spirit in the human soul is, for if religion is 
worth anything it is worth everything. What would you say if 
a man who had been a thief all his life wished to know how it 
would feel to be honest ? There be many thieves, no doubt, 
that watch everybody they meet for fear it is a sheriff or a con- 
stable. There are many men who fear every time there is a 
knock at the door that it is some one after them. But we will 
suppose him converted, or that he thinks he has been con- 
verted, and he says, "I have determined to be an honest man 
after this, and I think I see the signs of grace increasing in 
me. Last week I stole a pound, but this week only a shilling." 
That kind of reform in religion is very suspicious. A man that 
used to get drunk four times a week and is reformed so that 
he only gets drunk once a month is not reformed ; he does not 
know what temperance means. He may be on the way to 
knowing it, but not yet. 

Now, in regard to the true experience of Christian light and 
joy, go for the whole of it. It is worth everything. It makes 
life easy ; it makes experience radiant ; it is the purpose of 
God, and the promises of God cover the whole ground, and 
" whosoever will let him take of the water of life freely." " I 
will give him rest unto his soul,'' says Jesus. 

Let me, in closing, only say one word more. Christ's way 
of happiness is not man's way of happiness. You are not 
happy in proportion as you are rich ; you are not happy in pro- 
portion as you are high in station, nor as you are in influence ; 



Liberty by Bonaags. 115 

indeed, I often think that the more a man has of this world's 
goods and honours the less happy he is. I am happier than 
if I was rich — I am far from it ; but I know the lives of rich 
men, and I would not be a rich man such as I have seen — no, 
not for all the globe if it were one solid mass of gold. For 
how do men get riches but by sacrificing too often humanity, 
knowledge, taste, refinement, conscience? They win their 
souls to bribe Mammon withal. I have seen ships in the old 
days that lay off a port, blown off the shore by adverse winds, 
steamers that could not make the harbour, fuel giving out, 
bulkheads torn asunder, the inflammable cargo used to raise 
steam, beating against the wind and waves until they came 
into port at last all dismantled, and I have seen a great many 
rich men that came into the port of old age with everything 
torn out and burned up that should make them happy in their 
old age — empty, stripped, almost valueless. A man may seek 
in this world riches, and honour, and station, and all the 
pleasures that come from the appetites, the lusts, or the pas- 
sions, and he sows to the wind and reaps the whirlwind, and 
life goes out with him at last, dark, and a clouded sun — no 
hope, no joy. And I have seen women from whose hand had 
been snatched everything that was dear in life except hope, and 
love, and trust ; impoverished, abused by drunken husbands, 
sometimes — I have seen them when it seemed to me that they 
had nothing on earth to make them happy, while they said, 
" I have everything on earth to make me happy ; I am a child 
of the King, and He never leaves me nor forsakes me; I am 
happy because I am the Lord's." I tell you that the pomp 
and service of great funerals has -oftentimes very few angels 
hovering in the air ; I tell you there be many and many poor 
pauper funerals where the air is thick with the angels that are 
convoying that happy and blessed soul to the kingdom of 
God's grace. Seek not the world ; seek not its honours nor 
its treasures, nor its fallacious joys ; build yourself into man- 
hood on the pattern of Jesus Christ, and the things that you 
do not seek will come flocking to you of their own accord, 
and you shall have joy by day and by night, and hope that 
never fails; and oh, when the earth recedes you will have 
nothing to regret ; you will leave nothing behind you that is 
worth taking ; you will take the soul that is re-fashioned in the 



n6 Liberty by Bondage. 

image of Jesus Christ; and as you draw nearer to the end 
you will draw nearer to the beginning ; and who can tell the 
first outburst of rapture and joy as one springing from the 
prison of this clay body beholds Him "as He is"? "As 
He is I " And here is His voice, sweeter than all music, say- 
ing with smiles, " Come; welcome." Let us all accept, then, 
Christ for our schoolmaster, and let Him educate us into 
Christian life, and then live to honour Him and die to enjoy 
Him for ever. 



WAR AGAINST GOD AND HIS 
KINGDOM. 



" And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and 
proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him, 
and proclaimed : The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long- 
suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, 
forgiving iniquity, and transgression, and sin, and that will by no means 
clear the guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and 
upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation." 
— Exodus xxxiv. 5—7. 

HERE you have the charter of God's moral government 
of this world. We know what God's government is 
over insensate matter, the law of force, the law of necessity. 
God never appeals to the mountains except in poetic form. 
He never says to a rock, "Descend." When it is let go, it 
goes down with its own impetuousness. We know what the 
law of matter is, its necessity, and government. But here w T e 
have another kind of government — over mind, and it is very 
important to know what is that constitution or charter by 
-which God raises, punishes, approves, or dislikes human con- 
duct — how He means to deal with it. In these words that I 
have read, you may, I think, see that we have the moral con- 
stitution of God expressed by which the human race, emerging 
into life, is to be governed. 

We have had a great many things said about God ; no being 
in the universe has ever been so maltreated and misrepresented, 
made so dreadful and so hateful as God, and that work of 
slander still goes on through misconceptions and through the 
imperfect ideas that have drifted down from ages of barbarism. 
The character of God is still maligned. Where a pulpit is so 
forlorn and barren and barbarous as still to be presenting a 



n8 War Against God 



hateful, demoniacal view of God, it is itself a father of infidelity 
in every respect. The God of the Old Testament and of the 
New as manifest in Jesus Christ must both of them come 
within the Divine circle of love. "Love God with all your 
heart, and men as your own selves," said Christ. Everything 
was built on that, therefore, any other foundation than that of 
love which is laid for the spiritual government of God in this 
world is a false foundation. Men may be saved, but it will be 
so as by fire, that do not build on that, and they ought to be a 
little scorched, for if there is anything that should be dear to 
a man it is the character of the loving God in whom we live 
and move and have our being. It is our heritage, it is our 
hope, it is to be our salvation. 

Now, I have read to you in the preliminary service, the 
request of Moses, who was entering on the greatest task that 
any man can undertake — to bring up and govern a slave — held 
people that had just emerged from their bondage, and who, 
like all enslaved people, were full of all weakness and mean- 
ness. He asked God to give him a conception of Himself, so 
that he could see how to steer, and in His great graciousness, 
God says by implication "Yea," almost literally, "I will not 
show you My glory ' J — no man can look in the face of the sun 
and retain his sight, it will blind him — "but I will show you 
My goodness." Yet, otherwhere in the Bible, God says His 
goodness is His glory. God is a great deal more than we can 
understand. We can understand a great deal of the Divine 
character; but when we have carried it to the utmost limit of 
comprehension, God goes on above and below, and incom- 
parably greater than the greatest thought of Him by human 
consciousness or reason, for we understand of God only so 
much as we have the germs of in ourselves. I have in my 
hand a sprinkling of the ocean, that is enough to tell me what 
water is, one drop will do that; but one drop won't tell me how 
much water there is on the globe all round and round. Human 
experiences will give some insight into what love means, into 
what justice means, into what patience means, into what long- 
suffering means ; but how can they interpret the God of all the 
ages, that has been unfolding the human family through all its 
stages of savage life, barbaric life, semi-civilised life, and every 
conceivable combination of human experience ? Who among 
us is big enough to take in the infinitude of the Eternal ? The 
agnostic says God cannot be known. If you mean the whole 



And His Kingdom. 119 

of Him, He cannot; but that is no argument against the 
knowledge of a part. Job says : " These are parts of His 
ways," and Dr, Chalmers interprets that and says God's works 
are a chain \ we look up through the lowest links, but who can 
see right up to the throne itself? 

The proclamation on Sinai is a brief outline of the Divine 
nature and the method which God pursues, in dealing with 
mankind. Sublime it is in scope and substance, but it is more 
remarkable that it should have been developed in that age. 
We look away, back through the thousands of years, and we 
see Sinai, we hear the voice, and the most perfect delineation 
of God's character and moral government comes down sound- 
ing to us through the ages. There is not a word too much or 
a single sentence to be added. How did it come in that 
remote period ? Then, when we think of the other mountain, 
Sinai speaks of Calvary because they are both the same ; it is 
the answer of the more modern age to the declaration of the 
extreme old periods of the history of the world, and Sinai and 
Jesus are speaking in the same language ; only Jesus is inter- 
preting Jehovah, and making known by his conduct and 
suffering what was declared to be the long-suffering and kind- 
ness of the God of the Old Testament. 

Now, compare this character and delineation of Jehovah, 
if you have the requisite knowledge, with the pregnant ideas 
of the gods of the heathen nations around about. The gods 
of heathendom were not condemned because they were not 
orthodox ; it was not on account of their heresies that the old 
prophets condemned the idols, it was because they were miser- 
able, wretched, dirty passions made to be gods. The reason 
why the Israelites destroyed the heathen nations about them 
was not because they differed in their religious worship, it was 
that Venus and Bacchus, and bloody Mammon — hist, cruelty, 
and every animal quality — were enthroned in their idols, and 
to worship them they had to worship the very worst qualities of 
humanity. And if you look to the mythology of the Roman 
and the Greek there is not a Greek god made known in the 
whole length of their literature that a decent man could afford 
to live with in modern times — not one — and in regard to the 
most of them, if they had lived in our day they would be in a 
penitentiary. That out of such beliefs, and misapprehensions, 
and gross slanders of Divinity there should have arisen this 
stately description of Jehovah is one of the wonders of evolving 



i2o War Against God 



history. After thousands of years we come down to a more 
perfect conception of it, because we have seen the unfolding 
of it in the course of God's dealings with nations and with 
mankind. 

There are three aspects that well deserve a moment's atten- 
tion separately. First, there is in this description the intro- 
duction of the fact of heredity ; there is a declaration that 
morality is the end sought by creation ; that nature, properly 
directed, works towards the higher, and not towards the lower 
qualities of mankind, and tends toward intelligence, obedience, 
prosperity — that that is the direction in which the natural world 
was intended to work out itself — towards morality; and, 
thirdly, the moral character that is given of God in conducting 
His government over mind and matter. 

Now, what is heredity ? We all know in a general way that 
the progeny follows the parents. Lions' whelps are all lions' 
cubs ; the bear brings forth no sheep — only a bear ; the horse 
brings forth colts that are in their turn horses ; eagles breed eagles , 
doves breed doves ; and in the offspring of the lower kingdom 
the margin is very strait in which they change. You never 
knew a depraved dove. You never heard of a civilised shark, 
nor of any shark that was other than a shark. He follows the 
line of his endowments. Some things are produced from seed, 
and never from anything else, and all that is created below man 
has, comparatively speaking, so low a range, that there is not 
much space between the top and the bottom, and therefore 
there is not much room for fermentation and for development. 
The first creature that can sin is man, and the reason is that 
there is so much of him ; he has the whole animal in him, 
bone, muscle, heart, blood, passions ; but man has something 
beyond all that. He has a social nature with the animals ; 
then he has above that the moral nature, which discriminates 
between right and wrong ; and then he has the spiritual nature, 
which goes out beyond the mere animal, and reaches up to the 
spiritual realm. Sinning is the result of the conflict between 
the higher elements of man and his lower tendencies. You 
will find him described in Romans vii. The flesh man is the 
animal ; the spiritual man is the man of thought, the man of 
feeling, the man of inspiration, and, as Paul says, they quarrel 
all the time. The natural, which is the animal man, cannot be 
reconciled to the law of God, and won't be ; he won't have the 
harness on him, and he says : " We cannot please God." Old 



And His Kingdom. 121 

interpreters said that man was so depraved by reason of 
Adam's fall that he could not please God. Nonsense ! Stuff ! 
A, man cannot please God by his appetites and passions — and 
that is the sort of man that populates the globe mostly — man 
through his passions cannot offer anything that is worthy of 
the Divine regard, but when he mortifies, that is, subdues him- 
self, then he is lifting up the social and moral affections to 
God. Now he is reconciled. That is God's law, that a man 
should live by the top of his brain, and not by the bottom 
of it. 

Now in the case of heredity, this variation which we see in 
the animal kingdom is very slight ; but when we come tc 
human nature, the possibility of variation is immense. A man 
can come down or go up. The household springs from two, 
and they represent different lines of descent, bringing down 
from the ancestral stock different qualities, and the combina- 
tion in the children is different, some following the line of the 
father, some the line of the mother, and so there is an endless 
variation in children. And it works both ways. It may work 
towards degeneration or towards a higher moral elevation ; but 
it is there, and the conduct of the parents is such as to make 
all the difference in the world in the nature that they should 
give to their children. God says, if you live in obedience to 
the great laws of His kingdom you will transmit that to your 
children. I do not mean that a child is born in righteousness, 
but a child whose parents have lived in obedience to God's 
law starts with a better chance for righteousness than any other. 
A parent says, with the most cursed selfishness known to 
humanity : " If I indulge in drinking or in lusts I am my own 
worst enemy." I beg your pardon ; you are the worst enemy 
to your children. They inherit your indulgences ; they are 
cursed when they start on the stream of life, whose width and 
length no man can compute, for God says : " I will punish," 
that is the vote of nature, " and visit the iniquities of the 
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." 
The children of thieves are born with an impulse to steal ; the 
children of drunkards are born with a shattered nervous system, 
and with an appetite that is as hot as hell. God says to parents. 
" If you want your children to do well, by all the love that 
nature and grace give to a man for his offspring, take care of 
yourself" — for God's sake, and your own sake, and above all 
for the sake of your children. 



122 War Against God 

Here is, then, the declaration of that which is, comparatively 
speaking, in philosophy a modern doctrine, but it was uttered 
far back in the ages before ever philosophy found it out — 
" visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto 
the third and fourth generation." Then here is the clasp, the 
the clamp, that virtue has upon mankind, holding man to right 
ways through the family and for the family. 

Then, next, there is annunciation that morality or moral ex- 
cellence is the aim of the Divine government. The end of 
the passage, because it was at the end, to a very large extent has 
been understood as a threat — namely, that He will by no 
means clear the guilty. Men say, men are great sinners in 
this world, and sin must somehow or other be atoned for, and 
God is not going to clear men, unless there is some process 
by which He can do it justly; and if men sin, it is only by 
the sin being transferred to another, who shall bear the penalty, 
that God can clear the guilty. But that is not taught here : I 
do not believe it is taught anywhere. I believe in an atone- 
ment ; I believe God's nature is an atonement ; it is an abso- 
lute necessity of love, and all that man wanted to know was, 
that that was perfected in the testimony of Jesus, the Lamb 
that was slain, from the foundation of the world. It was 
then disclosed more carefully than at any other time, but it 
had existed from all eternity. As long as God lived there 
was that in Him which would forgive iniquity, transgression 
and sin. 

But the declaration here is this: "My government is not 
indifferent which way the human race goes. If the human 
race are under animal passions and are determined to go down, 
I will not bless them ; they shall reap the fruit of their own 
doing and be filled with their own devices ; I will hold stead- 
fastly to this, and it is my purpose that they shall work upward, 
and I will never forget it ; I will never through indolence, I 
will never through weak sentimentality, I will never, for any 
purpose whatever, consent that this great human race, on the 
revolving ball, shall go trudging down, back, back to the 
primal existence of the animal world ; that is not the economy 
I am exercising in the world ; I will not clear the guilty in 
that sense. Obedience to law shall for ever and for ever be 
the condition of satisfaction; I will make it clear in every 
family ; I will make it clear in every neighbourhood ; I will 
make it clear in every nation, in every age," and from the 



And His Kingdom. 123 

beginning down to this day strength, prosperity, health, long 
life, and everything that blesses this world in the human 
economy have come from obeying the laws of God. And all 
the groaning and trouble, and woe, that creation has seen 
down to this day, the whole of it, has come from the failure of 
men to obey those laws of God that should lift them from 
the animal and cairy them up to the intelligent and virtuous. 
The sun rises and sets to carry out the purposes of God ; 
seasons come and go for the sake of promoting the develop- 
ment of men upward and upward. The history of the world 
is read backwards if you do not see that tendency ; and when 
you follow that tendency to the root, you hear God say : 
"This is what 1 mean ; I will make a difference between good- 
ness and selfishness, between mercy and cruelty. I will make 
the whole of history to declare this one thing, that God is a 
Father who seeks man's spiritual elevation ; no man can cheat 
Me; what a man sows that shall he reap — he that sows to the 
flesh shall reap corruption, and out of corruption comes the 
tormenting worm ; and he that sows to the spirit shall reap 
life, and life everlasting." So that we have here, not a declara- 
tion of God's vengefulness, not what some not well- taught 
men have declared, that God has such love of good folks, that 
He sits above and says : " No matter what happens, I will 
take care of you ; " and to the wicked, "Ye cursed creatures, 
you are damnable, and I will damn you ; I will do it for the 
sake of My law, for the sake of My justice; I will do it 
because I promised to do it." There is such a heathen view 
of God, that Watts spoke of sprinkling the burning throne 
with blood, as if baptizing a bloody, demoniac Deity. No, 
no ; the decree that runs through all human unfolding is this, 
to lift men higher and higher, and He uses pain and penalty as 
the parent does, not because he hates the child, but because he 
loves him, and oftentimes the want of pain causes a child to 
slide down to worse and worse. 

Now, in the conduct of such a government as this we have, 
in the third place, the declaration of the administration which 
God will pursue. Here is the description of Him: "The 
Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant 
in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving 
iniquity and transgressions and sin, and that will by no means 
clear the guilty." Put these two qualities together if you can. 
Take these qualities of God's administration — mercifulness^ 



£24 War Against God 

graciousness, longsuffering, patience, abundant goodness. 
When a poor man has a little treasure, abundance means 
something to him ; but over against his house is a neighbour 
with a larger farm, with more herds and cattle, and abundance 
means a good deal more then. And in a neighbouring town 
there is a millionaire who has endless resources, and 
abundance means a great deal more then. And when you go 
to the monarchy and the national treasury, royal abundance 
stretches itself out almost beyond imagination. What, then, is 
abundance with God, infinite, unspeakable in height and 
depth, and length and breadth ! And when that abundance 
is abundant in goodness ! There are a good many just men in 
the neighbourhood — very nice sort of folks — but they are cool, 
right straight up and down, not much elasticity in them, hard 
when it is necessary, tolerably good-natured ; but there is in the 
neighbourhood some kindly woman. I remember my old 
nurse ; I remember what goodness was when I think of her. 
When I was hurt, she was hurt ; when I was sad, she was sad ; 
when I was afraid to go to my mother, I could go to my nurse. 
My mother was too pious for me ; my mother that brought me 
up — my second mother — as good a woman as ever lived — was 
without any demonstrativeness of sympathy. And I never 
once in all my childhood, when I was hurt, ran and put my 
head in her lap — never. I used to go to the door and hear 
her praying, and I knew she was praying for me ; but old 
Anne Chandler — how she, in her gracious lap, squeezed me ! 
When I was in trouble I ran to her — from her came the cake, 
from her came the candy, from her came the sweet promises 
to go out — and if I was sent to the cold room and the cheer- 
less bed, she ministered to me in the morning, and made my 
slices of hunger-bread proportionately thick, and put enough 
molasses on it. Goodness ! Oh, what a word that is ! There 
are no latitudes, no longitudes to goodness. And "abundant 
goodness," and " Divine," what must they be ? The sun is 
not bright enough to tell the brightness of God's sweet face, 
nor yet the tranquil moon to tell of His mercy, nor the 
summer, with all its treasures, can tell the trembling soul of 
all God's goodness — His fulness always changing, never ending. 
Jesus Christ taught the world that Divine love suffered, that 
Divine love was of a nature that suffered for another rather 
than that other should suffer for himself — He gave His life 
once by laying it down, and afterwards by taking it up, and 



And His Kingdom. 125 

wearing it for ever and ever, that He might bring many sons 
and daughters home to glory. If there be any thought of God 
that is other than that, if He is not the most beautiful, the 
most loving, the sweetest tempered, the most gentle and 
patient ; if God is not of all you ever knew the most blessed in 
disposition, then the Bible lies. Go and see what mothers are, 
and you gather the sweetest conception of human life at the 
side of the cradle ; but that is only a spark out of the soul of 
God. Go and see how a man will toil for his children ; how 
he will live low for the sake of their living high, and how must 
the eternal God for countless thousands of years have been 
suffering with this world that He may raise it up little by little, 
and be the salvation of the race. All the terror which is spoken 
of in God is that terror that works out through you. Is God 
terrible when He stands behind a sinner, and won't let him go 
down— when He stands like a sharp-pointed hedge near him ? 
A hedge is a good thing if there is a precipice on the other 
side. If you know there is a hedge you go along knowing you 
cannot tumble over. The thorns may scratch a man, and he 
does not like them, but he likes them better than he likes 
death. A man's sufferings are God's voice, by which God 
determines they should not go down ; and pain and penalty 
are parts of God's mercy towards the race, that otherwise, in 
uncontrolled animalism, would wreck itself and be destroyed. 

And, more than that, in God there is all that is esteemed 
among men. Are the lines of beauty beautiful ? God is the 
artist. Are colours exquisite? They would not have been 
here if God had not been delighted with colour. The voice 
of poetry, is that sweet in your ear ? Who gave birth to the 
poet ? Is oratory and commanding eloquence entrancing ? 
God is the most eloquent preacher that ever was. When you 
come to see Him as He is He will not seat you on a bench 
and put you through the catechism ; He will not talk theology 
to you. Most gentle and winsome is the God of all long- 
suffering and patience and goodness, and He wants the same 
in us, for He says the fruit of the spirit is iove, joy, peace, 
longsuffering, patience, gentleness, goodness, self-government. 
These are the fruits of going to school to God in the human 
soul, so that when He shall appear, and we shall be like Him 
and see Him as He is, we shall be perfectly satisfied. You 
never are satisfied — I never have been. I have had hours that 
seemed full, but they quivered and disappeared. Neither by 



126 War Against God 



my reason have I ever been filled with knowledge as I would ; 
nor has my moral sense ever discerned the different shades 
between right and wrong as I would. I see what I want to do 
and mean to do, but am for ever falling short of it, and my 
whole conscience condemns me and I am not satisfied. For 
even love itself is shallow, and he that invests in love invests 
in trouble, and the family is broken up, and ambitions are 
broken up, even when honourable and worthy, and in this life 
we are strangers and pilgrims, and are seeking ourselves and 
seeking our Father's house ; but when you have broken 
through, and see Him as He is, and see yourselves according 
to the perfectness of the eternal world, every quality will be 
harmonious to the whole soul, and that soul, looking through 
the endless ages of the eternity, will be full of God, reconciled 
to God, to itself, and absolutely in concord with the whole 
realm of Divine thought, meaning, and purpose. 

I remark, in view of these explanations, first, that this is the 
only view of God that fits the condition of the creation and the 
unfolding of mankind. I cannot conceive of anything more 
insane, or that would so soon make me insane, as just to see the 
way in which mankind were thrust out in this world, and through 
how many ages men have struggled without instruction, without 
knowledge, with perpetuating and accumulating miseries, with- 
out altar, without church, without a Bible, without any thought 
of the future. To-day the continent of Africa might be sunk 
to the bottom of the sea, and the world would not lose anything 
with the exception of the emigrants that have gone into it — not 
a machine, not a conception, not a law, not one single philo- 
sophy — nothing ! The bubbles from the bottom of the sea would 
be worth as much as the men that live there to-day. That has 
been going on for thousands of years. Then take Asia and the 
islands of the sea, and when you come to consider that over 
against that we have been taught that God sits in the heavens 
and dooms every creature that does not come up to the fantas- 
tic idea of regeneration to eternal damnation ; that there is a 
pit of darkness underneath the world big enough to hold the 
millions and millions of creatures that God has been manufac- 
turing through the ages and left them alone, left them merely to 
the light of nature — why, if I believed that I would forswear 
all religion ; if I believed that, though the voice of Sinai were to 
thunder in my ear : " Bow down and worship such a God," 
every instinct of Christ that has been bred in me would say : 



And His Kingdom. 127 

" I won't. I won't worship demoniacal cruelty ; I won't worship 
a God that creates millions of men and lets them alone to the 
dim light of nature, and then subjects them to an eternity of 
torture — I won't do it." If a man bred serpents and sent them 
out into the streets, you would stop that very quickly, you would 
not let him carry on such a trade as that ; but the old barbaric 
theology has taught us that God has been manufacturing crea- 
tures by millions for countless ages, and sent them out into the 
world without caring where they have gone. I believe we have 
immortality by faith in Jesus Christ ; I believe that men are 
animals, are born animals, and perish with the animals, and it is 
not until faith comes that we have life and immortality in Jesus 
Christ. That disposes of the hideous mass of cruelty that has 
been taught us from ages past. 

God is not in a hurry ; He dwelleth in eternity, and can 
take a thousand years as if they were one day, and carry on 
the great scheme of creation, with all its wonderful develop- 
ments. There is no cruelty in the fact that all the way through 
the world God has been longsufTering, and gentle, and 
merciful, and patient, and has dealt with the race as they 
needed to be dealt with. No mother that ever carried a sick 
child in her bosom, no nurse that every passed night and day 
in an unwholesome room, can compare with the unparalleled 
patience of God to such a world as this. He knew what He 
was doing when He undertook such a vast task, and He has 
carried it out through the ages in such a way that we can 
rejoice and glorify God for the grandeur of His love, His 
mercy, and His longsurTering, With such a God over you, 
you come to understand what Christ said to Mary : " I ascend 
up to My God and to your God." You are the children of 
such a God as this. 

Now, I ask every one here that pretends to be governed by 
good sense and reason : Have you conducted yourself towards 
such a God in a manner that is sensible, that is reason- 
able ? I ask every man if you have been an obedient child 
even in the measure of your own knowledge. Has not your 
dominant state of mind been this — that you are afraid of God, 
and that you have juggled yourself with the thought that you 
would get out of this world as much pleasure as you can, and 
somehow or other would make a turn and a jerk at the end 
and get on the right side, and not be lost for ever ? Have you 
treated God as He has treated you, and are you living toward 



128 War Against God 



Him dutifully, affectionately, and honourably ? Are you not 
mean ? If anybody should treat you in such a way as that, 
are there words in the English language that could depict 
your indignation at such meanness as to live to pervert the 
gifts, and to study disobedience, and to thwart affection, and 
to do all in your power to alienate and separate you from 
God? 

When, therefore, we call men to repentance, to accept a 
more blessed view of God in Jesus Christ, and to live by faith 
in that view, are we fanatics ? Are we crazy ? The man that 
is living without believing in such a religion as is set forth here 
— he is the fanatic, the lunatic run mad. In wilfulness, in 
selfishness, in passion, and in vice men think they have liberty 
in them and pleasure ; but, in point of fact, under the admini- 
stration and government of the God of whom I have been 
speaking, selfishness is found to contract a man. If a belt be 
buttoned up just enough to hold the clothes together, very 
good ; but suppose every day you put the buckle higher, and 
the next day higher still, and go on pulling it in, by-and-by you 
make yourself as small as a wasp. Selfishness is different from 
selfness. Selfness is that care which every man must have to 
maintain existence ; selfishness is such a consideration of self 
as to deprive others of sympathy. Pleasure was not meant to 
run with transgression ; God has not made this world so that 
disobedience to His fundamental laws is going to produce 
quietness and satisfaction. A man may swallow the whole 
capital of life in a few minutes or a few days, but life has to run 
on, and pleasure is very soon exhausted except in those 
that employ moderation and obedience in religious life. Then 
there is pleasure for evermore, both on earth and at the right 
hand of God. 

So that a man is free not because he has his own way. A 
man wants all forms ©f stimulating wine and luxury and plea- 
sures, and by-and-by he says : " There are those miserable 
hypocrites going in and pretending they are having a good 
time, but I am the boy that knows how to take comfort as I 
go along in this world." Yes, and by-and by he takes hold of 
his foot — he has had his good time, and it has run off; he is 
rich, he has more money than he knows what to do with ; but 
his bandaged foot is lying in the chair beside him, his brow is 
wrinkled and he curses the doctor and curses himself. He 
has splendid pictures hanging about : but do you suppose he 



And His Kingdom. 129 

ever looks at them ? He never cares for anything ; he only 
wishes to get rid of the pain and die as quick as possible. 
That is the end of self-indulgence. If a man thinks that by 
stimulating pleasures is the way to liberty and to pleasure and 
power, he is a fool. The gallows ought to teach better than 
that ; the poorhouse ought to teach better than that ; the 
hospital ought to tell you better than that. The way to liberty 
is obedience to the laws of God. I cannot run, but I can 
make a locomotive and study God's mechanical laws, and that 
will carry me much faster than my own feet ; I cannot drive a 
ship, but I understand what the wind is meant for, and I hoist 
the sails, and the wind does my work for me ; I cannot see 
what is going on in every season, but if I study mathematics, 
by-and-by I can become a sort of prophet, and understand what 
is going on in the physical and material universe. 

The man that knows God's laws in the world and conforms 
to them has God in him, working for him. I cannot grind as 
the old mill did, but I can make a river do it for me ; I can- 
not control the elements, but electricity can fix them so that 
they run across the ocean, and can make them light cities. If 
anybody who understands God's law obeys it, that law turns 
round and says : " Well, stranger, what do you want ? I will 
do it for you." Obedience to Divine law is liberty, power, satis- 
faction. 

Every man, then, that sins sins against his own body, sins- 
against the social laws of the community in which he lives, against: 
the civil laws necessary for the integrity of the State, and every 
man that sins against these is committing suicide : he is sinning 
against himself. It is said he sins against public sentiment and 
public law. Yes, in one sense ; but it all culminates in this. 
— that he sins against himself, that he is his worst enemy. See 
what is said in a word or two by the Apostle in Romans ii. 6- 
and onwards : " Who will render to every man according to his. 
deeds : to them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek 
for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life ; but unto* 
them that are contentious and do not obey the truth, but obey 
unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish 
upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of Jew first and also of 
the Gentile ; but glory, honour, and peace to every man that 
worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile." There 
is the whole sentence made up. 

Now, perhaps to weary you with further discoursing, let me- 



130 War Against God and His Kingdom 

ask you, Is not this a God that every one should desire you to 
have, and is not Jesus Christ carrying out this whole view ? I 
wish I could make men see as I see, and feel the beauty and 
the glory of love. That is God. That is the declaration of 
the Apostle John : " God is love " ; and when you see, how- 
ever imperfectly, the branches of thought that have been 
•developed to you this morning, what it is to have such a God 
of longsuffering, mercy, generous patience, forgiving, and yet, 
at the same time, holding you up to the development of a 
nobler nature, could you not join in that rapturous song of 
creation, which I will read to you ? " They sung a new song, 
saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals 
thereof; for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God 
by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, 
•and nation ; and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, 
and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld, and I heard 
the voice of many angels round about the throne and the 
beasts and the elders ; and the number of them was ten 
thousand times ten thousands, and thousands of thousands; 
saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and 
honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is 
in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as 
are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, 
Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto Him that 
sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." 
Prepare, then, yourselves ; prepare to take part in that choral 
drama of the universe. God is worthy; make yourselves 
■worthy. 



TRUE PREACHING. 



" Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, 
and glorify your Father which is in heaven." — Matt. v. 16. 

THE light is evidently the conduct and disposition, for it 
is interpreted by "good works." "Let your light" — 
not your mistakes, not your doubt, not your unbeliefs, not your 
•anger and temper, not anything but that which is light. The 
light is the revealer of beauty. All colour disappears when 
light goes ; all forms cease. Whatever there is in art in all its 
ways is the child of light ; it sinks back into nothing the 
moment that light is withdrawn. And the light that is here 
spoken of — the light of God that shines through mankind — is 
to reveal such a character as shall make men wish that they 
were just like him. Nay, a right Christian life ought to be such 
a one as shall make men want to be religious ; as shall never 
repel them, but shall lead them to God. A pretty hard 
saying for any of us. LIow many men have we ever drawn ? 
How many men, studying our dispositions and our whole war- 
fare of life, have said : " Let us be Christians, too " ? 

Now, by the Gospel is meant, I take it, the whole system of 
truth and influence which God employs in developing human 
nature and building it up into perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. 
All that is Gospel which is employed in producing men in 
Christ Jesus ; not the manhood which Nature inspires, but the 
manhood that springs from Grace — perfect men in Christ Jesus. 
And, as I understand the teaching here and the corroboration 
of it in every part of the New Testament, I infer that a living 
presentation of the Gospel, not in letter, history, philosophy, 
but in life, in the character and conduct of Christian men and 
women — that is the Gospel which has the most effect in this 
world, and on which we have to rely for the conversion of the 
Avorld, for the advancement of Christian civilization. " Let 
your life so shine " — you might so change the word without 



132 J rue Preaching. 

changing but only intensifying the sense — so shine, and be so 
beautiful, so admirable, that men will be won by what you are 
to a Christian life and to true holiness. Let your life attract 
men to religion, in short. Not your belief, but the fruit of 
belief in you ; not the doctrine of the letter, however much im- 
portance there may be in that, whatever functions it may serve.. 
The power of the Gospel is in the living of it, and not in the- 
proclaiming of it. There is a gospel of the letter — a good 
letter too, a good gospel. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John 
are the recorders and interpreters of it, in its application to alii 
the phases of human life, and it is to be found in the letters of 
the Apostles sequent upon the Gospel. There is a gospel of 
the letter, and it is not to be despised or trodden underfoot in 
argument or illustration ; but that is not the Gospel that is. 
going to convert the world. That Gospel itself has got to be 
translated, and that translation is not going to be by words and 
philosophies, but by the turning of the Gospel into men, and 
making them what its spirit determines them to be. 

The gospel of philosophy is very much preached. It is. 
generally called theology. There is a great difference between 
theology and religion. A man may have ever so much theo- 
logy and no religion, and a man may have ever so much reli- 
gion and very little theology. And yet we are not to despise, 
theology. We want both — personal religion and intellectual 
perception of the connection between fact and fact, dogma and. 
dogma. Theology may be said to be the bones of the system 
of religion. Well, if a man was courting he would not like to 
court a set of bones ; he would like to have some flesh on 
them, some bloom. And men, when they are drawn to life, are. 
not drawn by the bones, but by that which clothes them, by 
that which is supported by them. I find no fault with theology 
except that it is made up of abstractions. I find no fault with, 
dogmas except that there are so many of them that are lies. 
I find no fault with difficult systems except that they seem to^ 
have been the means of provocation and quarrelsomeness and 
divisions and all sorts of contests in this world. I find no fault 
with these things, because they have been wrongly used- 
There is a right way of using things and there is a wrong way,, 
and in the history of the Church the gospel of theology has 
been the occasion of endless divisions, and separations, and 
quarrels, and warfare, and cruelty, and every work of the devil. 
It ought not to have been. It does not argue that a better use 
of theology would not have been subject to such a miscarriage 



True Preaching. 133 

and such mischief in consequence. But so it is. No man in 
this world was ever misled by the sweet example of a soul that 
was living in Jesus Christ. No man ever was led into sect and 
•controversy and quarrel by the light of His love, the outshining 
of the qualities that love begets. That has always brought 
men together. That which has brought men together is 
sympathy with each other by faith and love ; it is mere intel- 
lectual statements that have split men up and divided them, 
and given rise to pride, vanity, ambition, to all secularity. And 
then, when to theology are added the vast cumbrous institu- 
tions of historical churches, their lands and houses and 
honours, and the vast sectarianism that spreads itself with 
national magnitude abroad — why, then the matter grows worse 
and worse. 

There is a gospel also of fear. There is a gospel that is 
preached in such a way as to inspire in men salutary fear. 
There is nothing in the world that feels fear so much as love 
— an affectionate fear ; the fear that you have hurt the feelings 
•of the one you love most ; the fear that you are not adequate 
to the needs of one who leans upon you or upon whom you 
lean ; the mother's fear that what she has done for the babe in 
the sick hour should be injurious ; the parent's fear that his 
example has not taught his children that honesty and integrity 
which will make them prosper in the world. Love has its fear, 
hope has its fear — fear lest the hope being set before us we 
•should come short by our unbelief. 

But there is a fear of another kind — it is the fear that the 
slave has towards his master, it is the fear that men have that 
some will overtake them, the fear of the miser that somebody 
will find out his chest and his abundance there — it is a drastic, 
animal, low-toned fear; and any time that the Gospel is 
preached to mankind in such a way as to arouse a fear of dam- 
nation, it is not the Gospel any more. There is a danger on 
that side ; there is a perishing life on the other side : character, 
conduct, and responsibility go beyond the grave. But that is 
not what the New Testament was written for, nor what Christ 
came to make known to mankind. There may be a salutary 
and remote use of the great dangers beyond ; yet if a man 
preaches the Gospel so that the main influence of his appeal 
to men is " Save yourselves from damnation," and drives them 
like a flock of sheep into the right way, it is not likely that 
they will be much better after they are driven in than 
they were before. I do not think that servile fear ever enriches 



134 True Preaching. 

anybody ; and Christ, in the moment of His profoundest con- 
fidence in His disciples, sought even to disarm the little that 
they had : " I call you not henceforth My servants [or slaves], 
but friends." When a man is a friend all the motives that act 
upon him — love, and gentleness, and honour, and sweet per- 
suasion, and example — lift him up. When a man is a servant 
or a slave sordid motives are apt to come in — the man acts 
from his animal temperament, not from his moral and spiritual. 

Then there is also a gospel of justice, and I quarrel — well, I 
quarrel a good deal with everything in this world, most of all 
with myself, but with a good many things besides — and I quarrel 
with the way in which men have put this question of justice 
and of love. The philosophies do it ; they say that justice 
would set everything right in this world, and men are preaching 
a gospel of Divine justice that must be satisfied first. I affirm 
that there is no justice in this world except the first born of 
love, that love is itself the parent, and that any justice that 
does not spring from a warm, sympathetic, self-sacrificing love 
toward the object of justice is animal, cruel, heterodox. On 
the other hand, I hold that the gospel of Jesus Christ was 
meant to institute, first, the inspiration of a true and noble 
love as the mainspring of the preaching and living of men, 
and, secondly, to institute such a belief in him personally as 
that the motive should spring up in the human consciousness, 
not from the coercion of a system, not from symbols, or rituals, 
or sacrifices, or observances, not from outward persuasions, 
but that there should be such a living consciousness of Christ 
ever present with you as that your motive should spring from 
love to Him and from the consciousness of His love to you. 
That is my conception of the Gospel — it is a system to sup- 
plant Nature by overgrowing it. For Nature is like a trellis — 
in itself nothing but hard and seasoned wood, and grace is the 
vine that overgrows it and covers it, and is full both of beauty 
of leaf and lusciousness of fruit. 

That is the true Gospel. Then how do you teach it ? Well,. 
in a manner by the way Christ lived, in a manner by words 
which carry in themselves a certain efflorescence, but chiefly 
"Let your light so shine." Be that which the Gospel came to 
make men ; be it yourself so largely, so forcibly, so continu- 
ously, so automatically and habitually, unconsciously as well 
as consciously, be so changed and charged with the spirit of 
Jesus Christ in your own life, that whenever men look at you, 
whatever they doubt — they may doubt doctrine or clergy, they 



True Preaching. 135 

may doubt orthodoxy, they may doubt the Church or the inspi- 
ration of the Bible — they will not doubt that you are Christ- 
like, and that to be Christ-like is to be beautiful, attractive, and 
has in it " the promise of the life that now is as well as the 
life that is to come." That is the preaching that does not 
need a pulpit, does not need ordination, except that which the 
Holy Ghost gives when it produces the fruits of the Spirit, 
and when man is reconciled through love to Jesus Christ. 

Now, while physical truth and abstract philosophy need not 
depend on the character of the teacher, yet all social and all 
moral truth depend largely upon the living exemplification of 
them. A man's calculations in astronomy have nothing to do 
with whether he is a curmudgeon or a gentleman ; a man's deduc- 
tions in geology, a man's teaching in botany have nothing to 
do with his personal character. The meanest man in the uni- 
versity may, after all, be one of the clearest men in the pro- 
duction of truth. All that class of truth that belongs to the 
senses and, as we may say, to the outside of a man does not 
depend upon the character of the man that teaches it ; but all 
that truth that is social, that has relation to the affections and 
sympathies of mankind, and all that truth that is spiritual, that 
lifts a man up into the ideal, into a higher conception of right 
and duty, and the beauty of love and the service of God and 
the hope of immortality — all those truths do largely depend 
upon the man that teaches them. For if a man be himself 
known to be morose, fault-finding, and if he growls out : " You 
ought to love God," there is no man in creation who would 
be led in that way to try and love God ; the influence of such 
a man would batter the whole thing to pieces. But if a man 
is known to be himself just and generous, easy to be entreated, 
full of mercy, full of gentleness, and if he should say : "I be- 
seech you by the mercies of God that ye be reconciled through 
Jesus Christ," every one will say : " That is persuasion, that is 
what he lives — it is beautiful ; there is reason in his statement, 
there is reason in his life." 

It is the power of life in its threefold development that is 
the power of the Gospel itself. When I say this, of course I 
do not think it necessary to defend myself against any ultra- 
theoloajical imputation that I set aside the direct power of 
God. For the power of God is life itself. I am alive because 
God's power is with me and in me, and everything that is in 
the whole realm of conscious or unconscious life indicates the 
immediate presence, the all-pervasive persuasion of the Divine 



136 True Preaching. 

mind which fills the universe, and overflows it to all eternity. 
But, so far as human instrumentality is concerned, I speak of 
the threefold development of man — first, as animal in his dis- 
positions, depending upon which part of the brain he uses, 
the top or the bottom, the animal part or the angel part, with 
its fluctuations, coming and going, the nascent and incessant 
action of a man's social faculties, his disposition, his conduct , 
secondly, the outworking of what is inward in him, showing 
itself in words, in actions, in both the negative and affirmative 
forms ; and, thirdly, character, and the rendering of both these 
first two items so permanent that they assume to themselves 
the inevitableness of habit. When a man learns the violin, 
everybody within half a mile knows how hard it is. When he 
has gone for his summer vacation and has come back, people 
say: "He has improved very much"; it is much easier to 
him, and he goes smoothly through all the intricacies of sound. 
When he has gone away for five years, and comes back master 
of the violin, men say: "The thing seems to play itself; I 
don't belief he thinks at all where to put his fingers ; the music 
rolls out like water from a fountain." It is with everything in 
life ; we have to begin our training, and, finally, we become 
relatively perfect, everything becoming automatic, so that we 
do it without thinking. How much is two and two ? You 
don't stop to think, and say : " Two and two are — four." 
There was a time when you did. Ten from forty, how much ? 
You know at once — it comes like a flash of lightning. When 
a man begins to walk he makes tottering work of it ; when he 
has grown up he never thinks where to put his feet. The 
untrained man, when he goes into good company, does not 
know what to do with his hands ; but after he has mixed with 
good society, and has some self-respect, he has no trouble, he 
never thinks where he stands or how he gestures. When a 
man learns a language — I pity those who hear him talk ! 
But after he is perfected lie goes on easily, and everybody 
sees it. That is how human life goes on. First, there is the 
exercise of will power, of endeavours ; gradually we progress, 
and get nearer and nearer to the automatic state, and, by-and-by, 
when we come to anything near perfection, we do things without 
knowing it. The musician does not stop and think where he 
is to put his fingers on the piano. You do not think anything 
about the words when you read them. Once you were puzzled 
to read a book ; but now you read without spelling. Once you 
had to put your hand on the lines to know where you were; 



True Preaching. 137 

now you do not even think anything about the words. One 
of the most extraordinary phenomena of human education is 
the fact that in reading we do not even see the words or think 
anything about them ; but we think in the air, as it were ; we 
think of the qualities, or the descriptions, or the persons, or 
the truths that are encased in these black letters before us ; 
the mind is perfectly free from servility to them, although they 
are necessary. So in every stage of the Christian character. 
There is first the beginning — the disposition, the working of 
it out in conduct, and then carrying it along so far as that 
both disposition and conduct are automatic. You are esta- 
blished in that way of thinking, feeling, acting, living ; and it 
is in that stage that a man is most powerful in regard to the 
teaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Now, if I wanted to teach my child to love botany, one way 
would be not to let him go out till he had heard a lecture on 
botany from me. Every day when the boys were at play out- 
of-doors he would have to sit still and listen to me, and be 
" educated." I should tell him of the systems of Linnaeus and 
the rest, and talk of the "germ" and the ''petal," and he 
would sit and gape and wish the hours over. But there is 
another way. I take my boy with me to the horticulturist to 
see his garden ; I open the gate and walk in, and there is a 
blaze of light. Here are the magnificent vines, here are beds 
of colour, here are all the sweet things that can be imagined, 
whether of fragrance, or colour, or form. He is perfectly en- 
raptured, and by-and-by he says : "Now, father, I should like 
to hear something about these things." Botany did not inter- 
pret beauty ; the book did not make known anything about 
the reality of Nature. The moment he sees it is the reality of 
Nature he wants to know the fundamental cause or the philo- 
sophy of it— the underground statement in regard to the whole 
thing. It is the thing itself that wakes up men, not the philo- 
sophy ; that comes at a much later stage, and the most imper- 
fect one, too. We know how it is that a living emotion works 
upon men when a description of that emotion does not. I 
bring before you, say, the scene that we read of this morning; 
I never could read it without the deepest feeling — Christ 
healing the blind man, and the man waxing courageous by 
opposition, and refusing to deny his benefactor though he did 
not know Him. He was ignominiously expelled from the 
church, and seems to have had to leave home and the city and 
wander out forlorn and alone; and the moment Jesus heard of 



138 Irne Preaching. 

it He went after him, hunted for him, and when He found 
him He said : " Dost though believe on the Son of God ? " 
And the restored blind man said : " Who is He that I might 
believe ? '' " It is He that healed thee ; it is He that is before 
thee." " Lord, I believe ! " I cannot read the story without 
tears, and you cannot hear me read it, and see that my eyes 
are suffused, and not feel it yourself. You know the old Latin 
proverb that says : 

Si vis me flere, dolendum est 

Primum ipsi tibi. 

" If you want to make men cry you must cry first. " Whenever 
you see any one in tears you instantly feel a pathetic mood 
come on you. Or if you go into a house of merriment, and 
brilliant jests are flying through the air like a rocket, you begin 
to laugh even before you know what the jest is. The feeling of 
mirth in another begets the same in you at once. Or if you 
get into a crowd and see men with scowling brows and doubled 
fists — not a theological crowd, but some other sort — you at 
once begin to say : " What is this ? " and you feel excited, 
one man's feelings beget the same in another man. Every 
man of a strong nature finds an echo in others who come round 
about him, in the distinctively common feelings of mankind. 
So it is all the way through. I have known parents who, 
because their children have been angry, have got angry too. 
'* You little rascal ! " they say. " What do you mean by losing 
your temper ? Take that ! " When the child is angry, that is 
the time for the parent to be gentle ; when the child is selfish, 
that is the time for the parent to subdue him by pouring 
generous treatment over him. If you want anybody to be 
anything, be that yourself in their presence, and they will 
incline to it. 

Now, as laughter and sorrow and courage and enthusiasm 
and love reproduce themselves in those that are round about, 
so we are right in extending this more largely, and saying that 
the way to persuade men to Christ is to be like Christ your- 
selves in their presence. There is no such persuasion as that. 
What is the best teaching in this world — the teaching that lasts 
the longest ? Not in the church, but in the church before the 
church — the household. The child grows up, the mother has 
the instruction of it ; she sings him her song, she meets all his 
sorrows with sweet gentleness and persuasion, she teaches him 
the truth of God and immortality, and he grows up six years, 
seven, eight, ten, fifteen, with the recollection of all her lenity, 



True Preaching.\ 139 

her forgiveness, and the magnanimous faith that she shows to 
him, and the hopes that she kindles in him. He does not 
know his catechism, but he understands . his mother ; he does, 
not know much about the confession of faith, but he knows a 
great deal about the confession of his mother ; and when he 
leaves the house and goes into the world, bandied about by 
adversity, swept away by unbeliefs, here, there, and everywhere,, 
there is always one cord that holds him ; the cord that held him 
to the altar and the church may have snapped, but there is one 
silver cord that never breaks, and he says : " If ever there was- 
a Christian in this world, it was my mother." That still holds 
him, and, in the providence of God, the memory of the mother's; 
sanctity and sweetness and beauty brings back the unbeliever 
in old age to the faith with which his mother began his early 
life. There is no instruction like the loving heart of our 
loving mothers in this whole world. 

Then we see another illustration of the power of living truth,, 
as distinguished from textual and philosophic, in the revivals 
of religion. These have been supposed, in ages past, to be 
mere enthusiasm — a blessed enthusiasm ! — to be anything but. 
what they are explained to be, and very likely they are ; the 
explanation is not always adequate to the phenomena. I hold 
that a revival of religion is the exaltation of the common 
feeling in a Christian community, so that the whole community- 
are lifted up into emotions, and they form a stream of influence- 
In religious revivals men are convicted of sin ; before they 
have always defended themselves. But when they come into 
the presence of men broken down in the consciousness of their 
own sin, when the conscience bears witness, when unreconciled 
men come together in the presence of God, and in the sanc- 
tuary each confesses that he is guilty, and the whole audience 
is moved to tears — then it is that men are convicted of sin,, 
and they feel that there is a difference between morality and 
true spiritual religion ; then it is that men believe that there is 
such a thing as the down-shining of the Holy Ghost in the 
affairs of men. It is the living power that produces conviction, 
the most powerful conviction. You may say that it produces 
feeling, but not the accurate philosophy of feeling. Well, that 
may come afterwards. If I had been in the desert, parched, 
unto death, when Moses smote the rock, I should have drunk 
first, and then asked him to explain how it was that the foun- 
tain ran when he struck the rock. First the thing, then the 
philosophy of the thing to those that need the philosophy. 



140 True Preaching. 

So it is with the enthusiasm of patriotism. Ordinarily men 
are so concerned — and, as far as I know, with no very great 
blameworthiness — about their own affairs that they are not 
able to pay any attention to the State and the Commonwealth. 
But by-and-by there come rumours of attack and of deadly 
struggle, and men leave their shops and their ploughs and 
their tools, and they flock together, and are animated by a true 
heroism. " Take my property," they say. Yes, I went 
through it twenty years ago, when the flag of the Union was 
fired at by rebellion and slavery. Such a shock I never knew. 
Men gathered together; the animosities of party and sect 
were swept away, the differences of political parties were extin- 
guished, and men close-handed said : " Anything that I have, 
take it for the Commonwealth." Thus the feeling becomes 
infectious ; men see it in each other, and all around patriotism 
flames. 

Now, these are but illustrations of what I understand to be 
in the text : " Let your light so shine," individually, " that 
men, seeing your good conduct [or good works], may glorify 
your Father which is in heaven." 

What, then, is the character that preaches the Gospel ? 
What is the preaching of the Gospel in the light of these dis- 
closures ? If love and lovableness in all its variations and 
developments inspired admiration, the enthusiasm of love, the 
courage of love, the liberty and manliness of love — why, then, 
love is the main thing. That is what Paul taught in the 
thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. 
Passing before the tribunal of the judgment seat one quality after 
another he says that though he spoke with the tongue of men 
and angels, though he were eloquent, poetic, enthusiastic in all 
the utterances that make men wish they had genius — Paul says 
if he has not love he is but as sounding brass and tinkling 
cymbal. In our day, when there is not so much of that, Paul 
would say that a man may be a perfect orator, an exquisite 
poet and lyrist, and yet be like a drum that makes the loudest 
sound and is the emptiest instrument in all the band ; so is the 
man that has not love, no matter what else he has got. Then 
he brings before us all the qualities that men do most aspire 
after — zeal, ostentatious charity, everything that is popular, and 
that leads men through ambition or popularity along the way 
of search and research — Paul brings them altogether into one 
great bunch, and he says that unless these spring from the 
root of love they are just good for nothing. Nothing is good 



True Preaching. 141. 

for anything that does not spring from the root of love — 
nothing in men, nothing in households, nothing in States, 
nothing among archangels, nothing in God Himself; for God 
is love ; He is the Fountain of all the universe, because He is 
the God of love. 

But men put justice over against love, and say : " Ah ! this 
preaching of love is all moonshine ; it is the mere mush of 
sentimentality ; men never can learn anything till they get to 
the sound doctrines ; men may have a good deal of feeling, but 
feeling is fugitive — knowledge is the real thing — knowledge." 
If there are any infidels in the world they are the men who 
put knowledge before love. If there is any orthodoxy in the 
world that is valid to the judgment-day, and beyond it, it is 
the orthodoxy of right loving. On these two — love to God 
and love to man — hang all the law and the prophets, said the 
Lord Himself. Love is the end of the law for righteousness ; 
love doeth no injury to any one ; love is the Gospel. 

Who, then, are the men that are the unconscious enemies 
of the Gospel ? First, the men that are fighting for the letter 
of the Bible while they are destroying the spirit of it. I do 
verily believe that there are some infidels that will enter the 
kingdom of God before some theologians. The way in which 
men fight for the outside of the Bible is not a good way ; it is 
a very ignorant way. For the Bible does not consist in so 
many pages, so much printer's ink, so many words, and so 
much history. It is the spirit of the Bible that is the true 
Bible ; and as the apple has a stem to hold by, but men do 
not eat the stem, and skin to protect the pulp, but men do 
not eat the skin, and seeds which propagate, but men do not 
eat the seeds nor the core, so it is with the Bible. It is the 
fruit of God grown through long periods of time, and it had 
to have an external and a physical existence. There are men 
who are so in favour of the Bible that they will not give up 
the least thing, the least date, the least bit of skin or core or 
stem. They are ready to damn the man who is scientific on 
these subjects ; they are so much in favour of the Bible that 
they tread down every instinct of it in order to defend it. It 
is as if a man should awake in the night and find his household 
attacked, and should rush with fury through the house, and 
perhaps slay his wife and daughters and upset everything in 
the house in order to defend his family. There is a great deal 
of such orthodox defence of the Bible in our day. The real 
inspiration of the Bible is that it inspires love in you and in 



142 True Preaching. 

all that read it. There never was, and I suppose there never 
will be, a book so directly inspired of God from beginning to 
end. There is no single precept in it that is wrong. Every- 
where it is against animalism, everywhere it is against vengeance, 
against cruelty, against selfishness, against using your powers of 
intelligence to oppress the weak and ignorant — everywhere for 
righteousness, righteousness the largest and the noblest. What 
do I care whether Moses wrote Genesis or not ? What do I 
care whether the history of the old books in the Testament 
■were thus and so ? I live in the atmosphere of the Bible, 
and see what it is to human nature, what its conception of 
manhood is, what the ideal man is in the Bible, and how it 
is a voice coming down bearing witness for thousands of years 
all in one way, all attuned to that Divine current of love, all 
that it teaches of God. It is the poor man's book, it is the 
sorrowful man's book, it is the book of the man that is weak, 
a book for the man that is ignorant, and it has in it everywhere 
the sign and testimony of the God that inspired it ; as to the 
kind of way in which He inspired, I don't care a pin. When 
I smell a rose I am not anxious to have a chemist by to tell 
me exactly what it is that makes it smell like a rose ; it would 
not be superfluous, but the rose is good enough in itself; I 
smell it, and I have it. Yet there are many men who make 
the strength of the Bible lie in its outside, in its arithmetic, in 
its dates, in its various statements on behalf of particular men 
in particular ages, which modern philosophy or science con- 
futes ; forgetting all the while the grandeur of the interior, the 
whole force and power of the book as a medicine for the 
wants of men, as a guide to men, thoroughly furnishing the 
man of God to every good word and work. 

Now, I hold that such men, while they think they are the bul- 
warks of the Church, are bulls of Bashan. They open gaps, 
they disgust men, they mislead men. Christ was never, as it 
seems to me, so near denunciation, cruelty, as when He was 
talking about the Pharisees and Sadducees. Who were these 
men ? They were largely men of culture, men of philosophy ; 
they were largely men that were bulwarks of the old Hebrew 
Church ; they believed in it, and although there were corrupt 
men among them, there were many, like Nathanael and 
others, who were "without guile." Yet listen: "Woe unto 
you ; woe unto you ; woe unto you ! The harlot shall enter 
into the kingdom before you.'' The dissipation of the top of 
the brain is worse than the dissipation of the bottom of the 



True Preaching. 143 

brain. A man who uses his knowledge and his moral training 
to increase his selfishness and his contempt of his fellow-men 
is worse than the man who abuses his natural passions and 
corrupts them. That is the awful testimony of Christ Jesus, 
and it ought to make a great many men tremble in their shoes. 

Then I hold that they are enemies of the Gospel who 
turn it into a system of ideas, and work the ideas together 
as the old mail was worked, steel link into steel link, 
till the whole body was covered with steel, and it required a 
very strong man to wear it. Well, men teach us systems of 
theology as if they were indispensable requisites for salvation 
and for the work of God in this world ; they have got every 
dogma and every persuasion, and they have worked them up 
together into a suit of mail that encumbers the man that wears 
it, that most men are not able to put on anyhow. I tell you I 
would rather have David with his five stones from the brook 
than I would have these men that have a very perfect theology, 
though a worthless one, and an imperfect life. The men that 
have tangled up the whole in such a way that the poor and 
simple and ignorant do not know exactly what to do or what to 
understand as to the way of salvation through Jesus Christ — 
these are the men that must be set down as the enemies of 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Everybody knows what love 
means. Love God — everybody knows what that means. Love 
your fellow-men as you love yourselves — everybody knows 
what that means. Why don't you preach that? I have sat 
at many examinations for church membership. I have heard 
men examined as to the Trinity, as to the theory of Atonement, 
as to the theory of the Church on earth ; but I do not ever 
remember in any ministerial council, or any other where I have 
been, though the candidate has been called upon to give the 
reason of his desire to preach, of his assurance with God, the 
cause of his being led to Jesus Christ, yet the essential points 
have always been as to his intellectual orthodoxy, and that 
which is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto the 
salvation of men, a heart rooted and grounded in all the 
grandeur of a true love — I have never heard a question on that 
at all. 

Then I am bound to say that the men who put justice first 
and mercy afterwards are also misinterpreted of the Gospel. 
Mercy is first. There is no justice except that which is in the 
hands of love. It is the doing that which love inspires in God 
that is justice, and that is His mercy. I have had the bringing 



144 True Preaching. 

up of children. They were not angels either; they followed 
the natural line, and had a good deal of me in them ; and I 
never saw a child that did wrong but that my love of that child 
made me hate the wrong that was in him. But I approached 
him with gentleness and persuasion ; and if that was not 
enough I added a little something. Animals have to be treated 
as animals ; and a little rubefacience on the skin is sometimes, 
a great help to a child. But when I smote my child, or shut 
him off from the enjoyment of the street or of company, did I 
do it because I consulted the universal spirit of justice ? I con- 
sulted my love for the child. I said : " I cannot afford to have 
my child spoiled ; I won't stand by patiently and see him an 
animal merely, greedy and selfish and lying ; I love him too 
well ; I am going to bring him up until he is a man" " And 
if ye, being evil, know how to give good treatment unto your 
children, how much more shall your Father which is in 
heaven." My God sends tears to me and many sorrows ; I 
have not altogether a sunlit way, but I look back to Him of 
old and say : " It is good for me that I have been afflicted," 
and I enter into a larger understanding of that other saying i 
"No affliction is for the present joyous, but grievous; yet 
afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness." 
God's justice is God's love, and " whom the Lord loveth He 
chasteneth." There is the philosophy of Providence ; that is 
the philosophy of suffering, penalty, and pain in the worlds 
and not the less so if men are not recovered by it. 

And now who are they that preach the Gospel right ? They 
who create it in the life, disposition, conduct ; all who, by 
reason of their love to God and their faith in Christ, are brave 
and bold for rectitude — they are preachers. All who have 
compassion on the ignorant and on those that are out of the 
way, as our great High Priest is said to have — all those are 
preachers of the Gospel. Who are the men that go against 
the true preaching of the Gospel ? Hard-handed men, selfish 
men, ambitious men that would clothe themselves with honour, 
come what may to every one else ; men who do the works of 
the flesh — they are the infidels. And the men, women, and 
children that learn the balmy ways of sweet and heavenly affec- 
tion — they are the true preachers. Look at the life of the 
mother. I never stand in the presence of my own congrega- 
tion and look over it without saying : " Would to God that 
the life of such a one were only here that I might step behind 
it and shield myself by it ! '' I have seen among the houses of 



True Preaching. 145 

the poor such courage, such simplicity, such unwavering trust 
in the Divine Providence, that I, who went to comfort and 
strengthen, have come away comforted and strengthened 
myself. It is in the families of the church, it is in the poor of 
the church, the widow, the orphan, the labouring hands, the 
•corrugated face that yet bears all these things so sweetly and 
trustfully, and goes on singing on the way — it is there that 
you see the preaching of the Gospel. I would to God that I 
were as eloquent as their life is ! How I would go on preach- 
ing ! But I have been too prosperous. I have had some share 
of the bitterness of life ; but, after all, my cup runneth over ; 
I have been led beside the still waters. Go, look for your 
church in the ways of trouble; go, look for men that have 
lost ail their property, and have stood up and said : " Thank 
God I have not lost my manhood.'' Go and see where the 
household has been desolated, and the mother could say : 
" Yes, I shall see them again.'' Go and look where men are 
hated and persecuted and spitefully used, and yet do not lose 
their cheerfulness, their sympathy for their fellow-men. There 
is the Gospel for you. The Trinity is a good doctrine, the 
Atonement is a good doctrine ; decrees are good — if you happen 
to have got hold of a right one ; all these things are very good 
in their way of usage ; so is a whetstone, but nobody ever ate a 
whetstone. When you want food you cannot feed on doctrine. 
But a good many men say : " Ah ! give us a good substantial 
food ; give us great standard doctrines of the Church." I do not 
object to their being given in due place ; but when do these 
men ever preach the Gospel of the heart — preach that love 
which brought Jesus into the world, preach that sympathy of 
God with sinners ? That is the true Gospel. And without 
discrowning the fruit of reflection and the organisation of ideas, 
only subjecting them to the search that every system should 
invite for itself, I do say that the intellectual propositions of 
theology are not religion, and that all that is religion is of the 
heart, and of the life, and of the conduct. 

And, now, as preacher and people, probably we shall never 
meet again. My years admonish me that my time is short. I 
flit in and out in the communion of this great mother-land, and 
meet every Sunday with multitudes whom I shall never meet 
again till I see them in the presence of our Judge. I beseech 
you, therefore, in the fidelity of affection, see to it that when 
you go up to knock the Voice does not come from behind the 
door : " I know you not," and you shall begin to say : " Lord, 



146 True Preaching. 

Thou hast taught in our streets, we have eaten and drunk with 
Thee; Lord, I defended Thee in that controversy, in that 
lapsing heresy ; Lord, I built up a church here and a church 
there"; and yet He shall reply: "I know you not." That 
was the outside of your life ; what was the inside ? Whatever 
you know not, whatever you lack in any direction, see to it 
that you do not lack that which is declared by the Master 
Himself to be the whole law of life — love to God and to the 
neighbour. And do not wait for your minister to do your 
preaching for you. Preach, mother ; preach father. Ye that 
have no voice, and wonder whether it is permitted to you to 
do anything, be — that is, to do. Be humble, be gentle, be 
courteous, be hopeful, be forgiving, be lenient in judgment. 
Words that do not reverberate in the air are oftentimes the 
best sermons ever given to men. Live religion ; and, then, 
when you shall go up, instead of hearing : "I never knew 
you/' there shall be the cry of joy : " Enter, and welcome ! " 
And then the clouds shall all fly away, all the bewilderments of 
men, all the strangeness of philosophies, when you shall see 
Him as He is, and be like Him, and all doubt and all fear 
shall be effaced, and you shall enter into perfect rest and ever- 
lasting gladness, 



THE GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. 



I PROPOSE to say some words this morning on the general 
subject of the genius of Christianity, and for that purpose 
I shall make a running commentary on the 13th chapter of the 
First Epistle to the Corinthians. 

When Moses was about to enter into the Promised Land he 
was forbidden, but he was permitted to stand upon the mount 
and across the Jordan to see what might be gathered by the eye. 
No matter how much men long to know the ultimate condition 
of the human family and the mystery of creation, they cannot 
do so until the days of disclosure in remote ages shall come. 
But we are permitted of God to stand at least on two mountain 
tops, and if we have eyes to discern and a heart to interpret, 
we can understand something of the coming day. This chap- 
ter is one of the mountain tops in which the truth, as it is in 
Christ Jesus, is interpreted largely, as it may be called subjec- 
tively, or as regards the individual disposition. The 8th of 
Romans is the other mountain top, and there, though by mere 
flashes and hints, we have a foresight, if we were but wise enough 
to interpret it, of what is to be the future condition of mankind. 

In regard to this chapter in the Corinthians, let me say that 
the first three verses may be considered as the judgment-seat 
of love. She sits with Divine authority there, and summons 
into her presence the things which men most esteem, and passes 
judgment upon them all. And, first, we find that which men 
covet, or, seeing it in others, envy and desire above all things — 
the power and genius of literature, whether written or spoken, 
of eloquence, of poetry ; and surely these things are regarded 
as the most eminent and worthful in civilised society. And here 
is the judgment : " Though I speak with the tongues of men 
and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding 
brass or a tinkling cymbal " — the noisiest, emptiest of all musical 
instruments that besin in noise and die when the noise ends. 



J 48 The Genius of Christianity. 

A trumpet that bears a tune in it leaves a memory behind it, 
and we go singing snatches of song from the full orchestra ; but 
who ever remembered a cymbal or a drum ? Noise ! noise ! 
noise i And so with this contemptuous fidelity the Apostle 
says : " Though you have the gifts of inspiration in the direction 
of literature, speech, poetry, if they are not set in love and 
inspired by love, they are noise." Men feel very proud when 
they have made an oration in Parliament, and angels turn 
away in disgust, because it was anger, because it was partisan- 
ship, because it had not the inspiration of a true love in it or 
.a kind purpose. It was the wrangling of debate, and sprang 
from envy or anger. Men write poetry that draws the attention 
of the world — lecherous, villainous, or sublime, the poetry of 
war, of battle, the epic, whatever it may be — and their praise 
goes sounding down through the aisles of time ; but if it did 
not spring from true love, one little hymn that broke forth out 
of a heart enchanted with Jesus is sweeter and nobler in the 
"heavens than all that was ever written by human genius. 

Then having dispatched literature, the Apostle calls before 
the throne the elements that are supposed to have a moral 
inspiration: ''Though I have the gift of prophecy." Now, 
prophecy has a double meaning, one that of foreseeing know- 
ledge ; and the other and derivative one, that of having know- 
ledge by which one becomes a teacher of knowledge. In the 
earlier times prophecy meant foretelling ; in the later times it 
meant declaring, whether known or first revealed : and in 
either way it was regarded as one of the highest types of genius 
for a man to be under such inspiration, that he becomes a 
teacher of men in moral things whether of the future, or of the 
past or of the present — moral inspiration. 

" Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all 
mysteries " — all that comes under the designation of moral 
teaching, all that must be under the inspiration of love, " and 
all knowledge,'' of every kind whatsoever ; if I ransack the 
world, and turn over every leaf from the morning sun to the 
evening setting sun, and have " all knowledge," moral, in- 
tellectual, or whatever it may be; "and though I have all 
faith, so that I could remove mountains ; " the power of 
inspiration not only to instruct, but to lift up and energise 
other men ; the power of conviction that strikes conviction ; 
the power of will that commands not one's self but one's 
fellows as well; though I have all these added, so that I could 
remove mountains, or, what is a great deal harder, men, and 



The Genius of Christianity. 149 

have not love — what am I ? Less than a bladder that a boy- 
kicks, less than a bubble that a breath dissolves — I am 
nothing. Yet, if you should take that away from folks, they would 
think you had taken all creation away from them ; you have 
taken nothing. So these go condemned from the throne of love. 

Then comes the philanthropist, who would be the most 
surprised of all. " Though I bestow all my goods to feed the 
poor." Ah ! if he give all his goods to feed the poor from 
sympathy with them, and in the spirit of the Saviour's declara- 
tion : " It is more blessed to give than to receive," then he 
passes out from under condemnation ; but if he give his goods 
to feed the poor because noblesse oblige, because his kind do 
that, and he must keep up with them, because his reputation 
depends upon it, and he must save his reputation, because it 
is the custom and the fashion, because of selfishness in some 
shape or other ; though he strip himself bare, if men only stand 
by and say: " Oh, what a heroic champion of benevolence I 
Oh, what philanthropy ; " Love says it is nothing — nothing. 

" And though I give my body to be burned." Ah ! zeal for 
the truth — this is the heroism of conscience ; men think : 
"This is my belief; God inspired me with it; I will stand 
up for it, no matter what it cost me ; I will die for it ; I do not 
care if I die by the stake or the flame ; I will fight for it." 
That is the easiest grace ever vouchsafed to humanity — to fight 
for what you believe ; and to stand up for " the faith once 
delivered to the saints '' has been the cause of more rending, 
more divisions, more separations than anything else. Men are 
chuckling with themselves and saying, " Have not I sealed for 
orthodoxy ? Do I not believe in the truth ? Do I not know 
the truth better than any variation ? And am not I pledged 
to stand up for the truth ? " And so they stand up for the 
devil — in its moral results, in its separations, in the inspiration 
of malignant passion, in the pride of sect, in the pride, it may 
be, of a peculiarity, in individual pride. This is the very- 
severe judgment-seat of love. Can you conceive anything so 
beautiful, any character in drama or history that is sufficiently 
resplendent to picture in your minds the image of a tran- 
scendent love — more beautiful than if the head were gold and 
the hair were as the beams of the sun ? And she sits in the 
chair of state, and calls before her those things which men 
aspire to, and which are really the secret of the best activity of 
human life. These are fruits of civilisation, these are really 
the green fruits of religion itself. But a green fruit is not fit 



150 The Genius of Christianity. 

to eat. While ripeness gives pleasure and health, greenness 
gives something else. And so love, sitting in the judgment 
throne, pronounces the malediction upon all these great 
qualities that civilisation has ever developed, and says that if 
they are not bottomed upon love and inspired by love, they are 
absolutely worthless. It is an awful scythe that cuts close to 
the ground, this sentence. 

Then next comes, from v. 4 to 7, a chant that I wonder has 
never been set to music. Mozart could create the music of 
the flowing stream, the murmur of the leaves, the song of the 
birds ; Mozart could never rise into the very highest realms of 
human feeling ; it was not in him. Beethoven, one would 
think, the grandest of all the old prophets of music, should 
some time or other, have been able to sound the heights and 
depths of transcendent love, and might have given us a sym- 
phony, or an oratorio in which were the words : " Love suffereth 
long, and is kind ; envieth not ; vaunteth not itself; is not 
puffed up ; doth not behave itself uncivilly (unseemly) ; seeketh 
not her own ; is not easily provoked ; thinketh no evil, re- 
joiceth not in iniquity (or the hearing of it, the morbid anatomy 
of evil), but rejoiceth in the truth ; beareth all things ; believeth 
all things," with the sweet credulity of a child to a mother ; 
" hopeth all things ; " if the facts are dark, or if the past has 
been gloomy, or if the present is clouded, yet hopeth; "en- 
dureth all things. Love never faileth." That is where the 
verse ought to stop. This is the chant, and the fulfilling in a 
man's life of that which is signified in these four short verses ; 
the whole of the transcendent and ideal life is comprised 
within the compass of that. 

Now comes, as it were, a recurrence to the opening judg- 
ment : " Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail ; whether 
there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether there be knowledge, 
it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy 
in part.'' This is comprehensive of the whole sphere of human 
life. All those things which without love are condemned he 
summons again to say of them, even where they are good they 
are partial in such a sense as that they do not lay a founda- 
tion for the philosophy of the whole of the universe, or the philo- 
sophy of time or of mankind ; they are all of them fragmentary. 

Biologists, with a certain knowledge of life, or physicists of 
some of the multitudinous schools, if they find the tooth of an 
animal, know how to construct from it the jaw and the head, 
and the whole body. One member by the analogies that are 



The Genius of Christianity. 151 

"known, can re-supply to the imagination and the draughtsman 
the whole animal. But the universe is so large, that the worlds 
themselves doubtless, here, there, or elsewhere, are so populous, 
and, above all, the Divine decree of creation is so beyond the 
limits and horizons of our present knowledge that no bone, no 
part, can ever interpret to us what the whole of the Divine 
plan and purpose is in the universe. Happy for us it would be 
if we knew how much there was of it even for time, but the 
world itself is only one letter in God's alphabet, and the whole 
literature of God, with the infinite combinations of all the 
letters a universal alphabet, so extends that scarcely less than 
God Himself can understand the grandeur of the whole. Yet 
we, with our little commas, and prepositions, and bits here and 
there, think we can undertake from our twilight knowledge to 
build for God the whole of this magnificent conception of the 
universe. Paul had come to that state of mind in which he 
said, speaking of it, as it were, with contempt, " Why, we only 
know a little bit here and there, a mere fragment : we know in 
part, we teach in part." That shows that Paul was never a 
theologian. If he had been he would have stuck to it that 
he knew everything, and taught everything. This modesty of 
the Apostle is not fashionable in our day. 

" But when that which is perfect " — and methinks Paul 
dropped his pen and looked up in silent awe — "when that 
which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be 
done away." And to make this more apparent to them he 
takes the illustration from his own childhood, declaring that 
the best knowledge of the best men in time as compared with 
that same knowledge in eternity, and in the heavenly estate, is 
really foreshadowed and partly illustrated by that experience. 
" When I was a child," he says, " I spake as a child, I under- 
stood as a child, I thought as a child ; but when I became a 
man I put away childish things." How ? Some of them were 
fables ; he still held on to them from association. Some of 
them were deceptions, because children come to knowledge 
through lies generally, and he put them away ; he reached a 
higher stage by which, looking even at the same things they 
assumed to him a totally different aspect and had in them 
a totally different meaning. "When I became a man, I 
put away childish things." " Now " — in the childhood of 
this world — " we see in a glass darkly ; " we see things in 
mass, not in definite outline ; we see things in the general 
substance, not in speciality and species; "but then," being a 



152 The Genius of Christianity. 

man, and looking up into the other great manhood of eternity,, 
"face to face." 

And it is Paul that says this. Astounding modesty ! The 
man that had been caught into the third heaven, and saw 
things that human language could not express, that it was not 
lawful, that is possible, to utter ; the man who communed 
almost face to face with his Maker ; the man who stands head 
high above all teachers of theology, and is considered the- 
father of theology in all the Churches ; this man says : " Now 
we know in part, there is a great deal that we do not know ;. 
there is a great deal that if I were to build systems, would make 
them imperfect, and they would pass away like prophecies and 
mysteries and general knowledge ; my conception of the 
grandeur of the whole truth when its separate links are 
brought together — swings a chain about the universe holding 
it together — my thought of the truth as it will appear to me 
when God should have builded the eternal city. Now I know 
almost nothing ; I know in part ; then I shall know even as I 
am known before God." There was hunger for full know- 
ledge. There was humility in the Apostle's mind, a belief 
that the little he could know here was merely fragmentary, that 
if he were to undertake to build the temple of God, and make it 
out of the fragments he had in his hands, he would misbuild. 

And now, in contrast with all this fading and failing, and 
passing fragmentary knowledge in this life, and especially in 
contrast with the great knowledge of the life to come, is the 
closing sentence of the chapter. Whatever may be the 
transientness of human knowledge, all things are not transient 
here ; there are some things that no chemistry will dissolve. 
Men's philosophy will make but a slender appearance on the 
other side ; men's eloquence will be like the rattle of a dead 
leaf in the November forest, and men's fancied systems, and 
the grandeur of a consicous power of interpretation — all 
these things are illustrative of the partial, evanescent, relative 
knowledge belonging to this state of being, not void of import- 
ance, because it is building knowledge, steps by which men 
are going up on to higher stages and higher knowledge, yet 
all passing. For when one ascends from a lower to a higher 
storey he leaves every stair below him after it has helped him up. 
So in ascending in earth, God employs a great many things 
in the material world, a great many things in governments and 
in social relationships by which to help men above them. 
But if men will sit down on a pair of stairs they will never see 



The Genius of Christianity. 153 

the crystal chamber or dome. And that is our perpetual ten- 
dency to call our knowledge foreknowledge, permanent know- 
ledge, perfect knowledge, and to sit down on it. Paul says 
that almost the whole scope of that which men call admirable, 
knowledgable, philosophical, and theological, is merely re- 
lative — relative to ignorance, relative to transientness, relative 
to growth — changing growth — bark, bark that every other year 
ought to be thrown off to let new bark form under it. 

All these things change ; but, he says, there are some things 
that do not change. What are these ? Theology ? God's 
nature ? God's decrees ? Man's origin ? His disobedience 
and fall? The plan of salvation? The doctrine of atone- 
ment ? The doctrine of the Trinity ? The inspiration of the 
Bible ? There is something in all these with which we have 
to do, but there is not one of them that is thought worth 
mentioning — not one of them — for he says that they, too, go 
on changing, and are relative ; when we come to see the 
whole truth, we come back and laugh at catechism, and creed, 
and confession. But there are some things that do not seem 
strange. What are they? Emotions, dispositions. The 
whole universe, from the seed form through every stage of un- 
folding, is to bear the precious blossom and fruit of what ? 
Faith, hope, love. That is the consummation. Everything 
before that, partial or impartial, perfect or relatively imperfect, 
all these things are to take their value from the fact that they 
are mere stages of growth, by which, when we come through 
death and find ourselves in the other life, we shall know our 
identity by the existence in us of faith, hope, love. And a 
good many of you won't know your own identity. These are 
not things that men put as the foundation for character ; 
these are not the foundations on which men build orthodoxy ; 
these are not the foundations on which men build churches, 
sects, and denominations, and quarrel and make every wicked 
work and way in life for the sake of defending the name of the 
Prince of Peace. 

What, then, are these qualities ? I cannot stop to go into 
all the detail. But faith is only another word for imagination 
applied. It is that part of the man by which men reconstruct 
and see and discern the things that the senses cannot interpret 
to them. And as applied to being and to character, and to 
condition, and to truths whose nature is essentially invisible, 
faith is the perception or the power of perceiving the things 
that do not report themselves to the senses. Therefore faith 



T54 The Genius of Christianity. 

is something higher than science. Science to-day is confessedly 
the knowledge that can be established at the courts of the eye, 
the ear, the tongue, and the hand ; it is that which may be 
true before a man's physical organisation, and faith is that 
which is true before a man's imagination, it is the constitution 
•of the mind that interprets things higher than matter. Hope 
is the sweet eye that never looks backward, the disposition 
which eternally lives on, which cures present evil, remedies 
every mistake, by an eternal sunrise. Hope doesn't believe in 
sunset, nor in the rolling hours that bring round again the sun- 
rise ; it is forever facing towards the east and waiting for the 
sun to rise. It is the power to live without bodily organisa- 
tion ; it is that element of the spirit that sees all that is un- 
revealed by matter ; it is that temper that lives in the glowing 
future and in the possibilities of blossom and fruit, of an 
eternal summer that lies before every man, that does not live 
in yesterday, that refuses to live in to-day, but that takes the 
eternal round of the future for it habitation. That is hope, or 
a poor description of it. And love, that flashes glimpses even 
in the animal economy, that swells into some notes and articu- 
lations in the very lowest of the uncivilised human races, that 
begins to know how to go alone in the household, that waxes 
larger and larger as the objects loved are put in our mind 
against the background of immortality, and that swallows up 
in itself every other evil passion or good passion, and is the 
man. There are three things that even the grave cannot ex- 
tinguish ; three things that no chemistry in death can change ; 
three things for which we are to wait till the glory comes 
beyond the horizon of time — faith, hope, love. And blessed 
be God for the last utterance : " The greatest of these is 
love." That is the mental constitution through which we shall 
think, that is the mental constitution through which conscience 
will act in the life to come. That is the bond of connection 
among those that in the spirit land have by the growth of 
time and by the sunshine of eternity become ripened; so that 
we shall then be in our manhood and know as we are known. 
And without following out the suggestion that it throws some 
light on the intercourse which we have with each other in the 
other life, personal identity will be preserved through the 
medium of these untarnished qualities. The intercourse of the 
other life will not be of matter, nor of sordid business, nor of 
latitudes and longitudes, nor of rising or setting suns, but in 
the unfolding moral consciousness of every man in himself and 



The Genius of Christianity. 155 

in those harmless friendships and those loves that insphere 
each other with light and life. Our identity will lie in these 
qualities. And there are many of you that had better begin to 
establish identity before you go. 

In view of this brief and running exposition, allow me to 
make one or two applications. 

And first, there are two great elements in Paul as a theologian, 
and it is of transcendent importance that we should analyse 
and distinguish between the two — Paul is said to be the father 
of theology, and by perversion of Paul, he is the father of 
modern and scholastic theology. The task that he had before 
him was not simply to make known his emotions in respect to 
the Lord Jesus Christ. His soul was as burning as the 
Equator ; and he declared that for his brethren and his kin- 
dred's sake, if he could but bring them on to the ground 
of love and faith in Jesus Christ, he could wish himself ac- 
cursed. It was only an audacious parabling of his experience 
with that of Christ, who laid down His life that the world might 
be redeemed. Now consider. Here was a long line of Jewish 
institutions, Jewish theology, Jewish liturgies, and ceremonies 
and services, and when Paul preached Christ to them, they 
said : " Would you have us abandon Moses and the prophets ? " 
"No," he says, " I would not ; I present to you another, and a 
better way ; all the things for which Moses and the prophets 
are of any value — namely, the inspiration and ideal of the 
higher manhood, the motive power by which men can develop 
that higher manhood — all these you can do better by Jesus 
Christ than you can by the Old Testament ritualistic services." 
Now a man cannot instruct a French audience by talking 
English; and if a man has to teach children, he must talk so 
that children will understand him. So when Paul was speaking 
to the Jews he was not talking to civilised Christians who had 
forgotten all about Jews — except, perhaps, to curse them ; his 
business was to take the ideas, the services, the ceremonies of 
the Jewish nation, and to say : " Jesus Christ Himself will do 
for you all that the lamb slain would do, all that the services of 
the sanctuary would do ; He is the living power and inspiration. 
Organised matter, with whatever moral intent or purpose, 
cannot stir a man's soul as a living being can, and Jesus Christ 
is that living being — the Son of God, heir of eternity, with a 
power that is let down on every soul that believes in Him, or 
will open itself to Him ; Jesus Christ will take the place of 
services, sacrifices, all forms and emblems, and devices of an 



156 The Genius of Christianity. 

external educatory system ; He will take their place." Now 
comes the theologian, and undertakes to make us Jews again ;. 
carries us back into that condition of things and says : " Christ 
came to make that law honourable ; this is the law of the uni- 
verse — man sinned, and God cannot forgive him, till he has 
done something to fix up that law that has been broken." PauL 
was preaching to the Jews that their law and their services — 
not had not been good, but had been insufficient, and that 
Jesus Christ, a living Divine force, now let forth directly upon 
the conscience and conscientiousness of mankind, would take 
the place of the old. That was his way. Our way has pro- 
duced that whole system of scholastic philosophy in which 
men's consciences are floundering to-day, and their liberty is 
circumscribed ; they are birds in a cage ; they may sing, but 
not fly. Now, Paul was a theologian in another direction ; he 
was a theologian for the ages rather than for the Jews. The 
grand element of Paul's theology was the nature of sole facts, 
the relation of heart-life to the formation of a man's outward 
life individually, the relation of Divine love to the production 
of the same in the human bosom, and then the relation of love 
developed in the minds of men by the Spirit of God to the 
whole evolution of Christian character and Christian institu- 
tions. Theologians had not taken that post ; they had recog- 
nised it, but it bore about the same relation as a man's vest 
pocket does to a whole suit of clothes. They say : " Here is 
the teaching of the Apostle, as the grand outlines and founda- 
tions : but a man should also have graces, he should have love, 
something besides mere knowledge," where as Paul thunders 
through the heavens saying : " Without love as a foundation in 
the teaching and in the practice of life, everything else is smoke 
and ashes." Modern theology, so far as it is based on the 
ancient — thank God it is struggling for a new birth, and is 
coming to the new birth of love — the old scholastic theology 
has been teaching after Paul's interpreted method to his Jewish 
countrymen, and that not understood by them. But the new 
theology is to be — as it respects the nature, supremacy, and 
results in the individual, and then in the whole human family, 
and then interpreted in the state, and then among nations — the 
prevalence of the power of love. 

I protest against any that shall say that I undervalue reason 
or conscience. I do not. But for eighteen hundred years 
since the revelation of Jesus Christ as the love of God — show- 
ing itself to be love in that it could suffer — we have been 



The Genius of Christianity. 157 

preaching conscience and knowledge, and what has been the 
result ? Where is Africa to-day ? Where is Asia to-day ? 
Where are North and South America to-day? Eighteen 
hundred years, and war thunders at the gate of every city on 
the continent. Eighteen hundred years, and yet the Church 
itself is marked with blood, for it has been the cause through 
its bad philosophies of more murders, more inquisitorial 
cruelties, and more separations than even civil governments 
themselves. Eighteen hundred years, and we have had con- 
science preached, and truth ! truth ! truth ! Eighteen hundred 
years, and the world has dragged like Pharoah's chariot in the 
Red Sea, and it would look sometimes as if the sea would 
whelm the Church under. Now when we begin to say : "Is it 
not worth our while to lay the foundations over again ? " and is 
it not safe to put the foundations where Christ Himself put 
them, " Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart 
and soul and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself? " — this is 
the Bible ; it was all the Bible that existed then. " Love is 
the fulfilling of the law." " God is love." Who so loveth not 
shall not understand. No man can understand God by the 
intellect; no man can understand God by any ratiocinative 
process. But He that is filled with the afflatus of love knows 
and feels God, just as a man knows when it is summer withou 
looking in his almanac ; God, is in him, round about him, above 
him, below him. Talk of orthodoxy ! What has orthodoxy 
done ? In nearly two thousand years it has done a good deal 
Paul says on one occasion that some through Christ had conten- 
tion, hoping to add to His bonds. What then? " Neverthe- 
less I rejoice, because Christ is preached," that is, the poorest 
preaching of Christ is worth something to mankind. So I say 
in regard to the whole sum and substance of truth, even the 
poorest rendering for the most part has some direct or indirect 
influence ; but here is the grand foundation which no man 
ever laid, but God Himself lays, and would it not be worth 
while to see whether or not, in the ages that are to come, with 
love, joy, meekness, gentleness, faith, hope, as the strenuous, 
stringent, and all-abiding soul of theology, the world would 
not fare as well as it has done by conscience and persecution ? 
I say it would do better. You say it would not. Well, go 
your way and I will go mine. 

That leads me to say next that, while the true preacher will 
not leave out any element of reason, of history ; any element 
•of interpretation, that which distinguishes him is the building 



158 The Genius of Christianity. 

up of men in qualities. " Well,'' you say, " the only way ta 
build a man up in quality is to preach the right kind of truth. 57 
You have been preaching " the right kind of truth " from 
generation to generation, and do not build at all. And more 
than that, the. sweetest characters that live are oftentimes out- 
side your own church and orthodoxy. You are obliged to 
confess, you Calvinist, that a man may be just as good a 
Christian as you are, and be an Arminian- You are obliged to 
confess that here and there you find a man who disdains all 
church economy and ordinances, and yet is as sweet a pattern 
of a Christian man as ever was born in the Quaker household. 
You are obliged to confess sometimes: "That man is a 
Christian if ever there was one ; " " My mother was a 
Universalist, yet there never was a Christian like her." Yon 
bring it to your minister, and he says ; " Yes, that may be a 
single instance." Single instances are like single wedges that 
split knotty logs. If it were so, that all the pugnacious 
theology of the ages gone by had resulted even in a small 
band of exquisitely white flowers and beautiful fruit, there 
would be something more to be said; but when you are 
obliged to say that God in His sovereignty converts men out- 
side churches, outside theologies, that in the great illustrious 
cycle of love men are growing up into Christ Jesus, though 
they are rejected in the church and rejected from the pulpit, 
yet they are among those that really teach mankind what 
Christian life is — so long as you are obliged to make such a 
confession as that how can any man say that the development 
of Christian character is dependent upon the theological lore 
and literature of the world. I do not disdain it; I say, in 
regard to different ages, it was the best exposition they could 
give ; in a ruder day, with more barbarous manners and 
customs, it led on and helped on, first as the old chain armour 
in days gone by was serviceable enough, but would be 
miserable to wear nowadays ; so I hold that operose and hard 
and barbaric explanations of the mediaeval ages might do some 
good in that time ; but they should long ago have fallen away 
from men advanced, as we are advanced, in Christian temper 
and disposition. The business of the Church is not to use 
the Church as an insurance office by which a man seeks to 
protect himself against future fire. The business of the 
minister is to build up men in the qualities of Jesus 
Christ ; for that he is to preach. All the tests, both for 
receiving men and advancing men in Church life, are of the 



The Genius of Christianity. j$g> 

disposition. As the disposition goes unharmed through death 
to its glorious crown, so in Church life it should be the 
business of every man to build men up to the perfect man in 
Christ Jesus. There are a great many administrations, a 
great many economies, says Paul ; they are all of God, and if 
you will let them alone, they will work out safely and be 
beneficial in the long run. Liberty is good in the Church and 
in theology, as everywhere else ; but it is the only place where 
there is no liberty of thinking. There is liberty in politics, in 
science, in philosophy ; it is only in theology .that men are- 
kicked out of livelihood and out of position if they think 
freely. The day is coming when we will better all that. I am 
the son of a theologian. I was baptized into theology. I 
believe some of it ; and some I do not, blessed be God ! The 
days are coining when belief will have to take a seat below 
love, when the head will have to do honour to the heart. 
Then we can say, as the Apostle said of the Church : " Ye are 
our epistles, known and read of all men." It is not, therefore, 
so much as an iconoclast that I say these things ; it is not that 
I scorn theology and all the steps of knowledge. No man 
believes in knowledge more than I do ; but I would assign it 
to its proper place, its subordinate rank ; I deny that it has a 
right to wear the crown ; I say that the heart is to wear the 
crown. 

One thing more. When I look sometimes at the condition 
in which the world is left ; when I am obliged to say that all 
Ethiopians are my brothers ; when I look upon the Asiatics 
and see how they are all left by Providence, I am thrown into 
deep dejection. It is not men that are so valuable in my 
sight, but my God. When I come to look for the eternal 
Father, the God of all compassion, of all love, and I find that 
the doctrines of the Church have spread such a veil over Him 
and I cannot find Him, I am like Mary in tears, and I say : 
"They have taken away my Lord, I know not where they 
have laid Him." And any seeming assault upon theology 
is not because I hate schools, not because I hate thinking, or 
systematic thinking, but it is because I love my God and my 
fellow-men, and I would tear away every veil and blow away 
every cloud that should prevent the full shining of the love 
of God for mankind. When I look at this condition of the 
nations I must find some other reason than that given in the 
creeds why God has suffered the world to go on as He has. 
For if He has doomed mankind to eternal destruction, except 



160 The Genius of Christianity. 

upon certain conditions, and then left them without Sabbaths, 
without Bibles, without priest, without altar, and if He con- 
tinues to do it from generation to generation, oh ! I cannot 
worship that organised and perpetual cruelty; I cannot wor- 
ship that ; and I take refuge in this thought of Paul : we see 
only a fragment here ; we do not know what the remote future 
is ; but this is disclosed to us — that future is to be the grand 
development of the sweetest and noblest days that have 
dawned upon the conscience of mankind in this world. And 
I take courage, and I say, there is a grand march in the 
universe. I perceive that there has been in time a gradual 
unfolding of higher and higher qualities, and I believe that 
may be carried forward, and is carried forward, not here 
alone, not alone at death, but on the other side, and that 
as when we plant the corn (according to Paul's otherwhere 
figure), then up comes the blade, and then the stem, and then 
the head and the grain in the head, or ear, so I feel that in 
some great field such as I cannot comprehend, God has 
planted a future that shall bear a harvest of shouts of glory 
and honour and salvation to Him that sitteth on the throne, 
and to the Lamb. All the steps, all the interpretations I do 
not know ; but the whole universe is moving up, yea, and 
without knowing it. And, methinks, that in those in- 
numerable multitudes of stellar hosts there are some popu- 
lated worlds, and that there are some great moral truths that 
are being developed there as here ; and as we hear oftentimes 
in strains of music exquisite stanzas and cadences, but by- 
and-by are permitted to come to a concert-room, where 
Beethoven swells in all the grandeur of his symphonies ; so 
there are, I believe, elements in the universe, here some, and 
there some, and by-and-by, when the great oratorio is 
chanted round the throne of God we shall see what the 
meaning of these movements is. " Now we see through a 
glass darkly, then face to face ; and we shall know as we are 
known. And in that great day, O, my soul, be not thou 
laggard nor broken-winged ; let thy head be love and thy 
wings be faith and hope ; and foremost to where my mother 
stands, my father, my children, and whom I love best on 
earth, let me wing my way ; only amidst them all, and be- 
fore .greeting, I may cast myself at the feet of Him who 
loved me and died for me and washed me in His own blood. 
To Him, Jesus, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to Him be 
the praise ! 



THE ATMOSPHERE OF A 
CHRISTIAN LIFE. 



"For we are saved by hope." — Romans yiii. 24. 

ONCE it would have been said : " We are saved by 
repentance." Again, in other places it is said that we 
are saved by faith, and again, we are taught that we are saved> 
not by anything that is in ourselves, but by the grace and 
mercy of God. When a man takes a potion of medicine that 
is made up of half a dozen different elements, he is not 
stumbled at all by being told that each of them ministered to 
health, and that all of them put together saved him. A man 
is saved by love ; he is saved in some respects by fear ; he is 
saved by Divine grace ; he is saved by faith ; he is saved by 
any or all of them put together. They are all true. Now, you 
shall find, I think, that in the New Testament, the elements of 
salvation are all of them of a joyous, elevating, inspiring cha- 
racter; for though suffering is recognised, it is low in its 
place, and it belongs to the lower experiences of human life 
and human nature ; and the higher developments of God's 
grace come to us almost always in the form of light, and 
warmth, and beauty, and gladness. Right in the face and 
teeth of the old ascetic doctrine of religion, it is the most 
beautiful thing that ever blossomed on the earth. The old- 
fashioned way was to teach us that here men grow in rocks, 
but that there they will blossom out ; that here they are in 
their lower stages, but they will be beautiful when they get to 
Heaven. I hope they will. I hope they will be a good deal 
more beautiful than they have been made to be on earth. But 
I hold that religion is beautiful to begin with, and at every 
stage and step : not that it is perfected, not that the harmony 
of the soul has yet been clearly developed, but in so far as 



1 62 The Atmosphere of 

salvation has taken effect and is taking effect, the experiences 
of it are those of joy and not those of sorrow. But that will 
come more plainly a little further on. 

Salvation includes rescue from evil here and hereafter. The 
main business of salvation is reconstruction. That is better 
than nothing — to be saved from hell — but it is rather a mean 
idea. And to be saved into joy — that is a great deal better 
than nothing, but it is relatively low. But to be transformed 
into the image of God through Jesus Christ, and to have been 
lifted up into a state that is salvable, is a much nobler concep- 
tion of religion ; and that, as I understand the teaching of the 
New Testament, is the work of grace that God is carrying on 
— the work of transformation towards a higher condition of 
mind and emotion and conduct and character that shall con- 
summate itself in the other and higher climate. 

So you shall find that this idea of a higher and a nobler 
manhood, everywhere intimated, is nowhere else more admir- 
ably expressed than in Paul's writings, as, for instance, in 
Ephesians, where it is said : " And He gave some, apostles ; 
and some, prophets ; and some, evangelists ; and some, pastors 
and teachers." What were they given for ? For wrangling, 
one would think, if you look back on history. But no. " For 
the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for 
the building up of the body of Christ ; till we all come in the 
unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, 
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful- 
ness of Christ." That is what all ministrations on earth are 
made for ; that should be their drive and their direction ; to 
reproduce in men substantially the character, nature, and 
genius that were in Jesus Christ Himself, and manhood ; not 
salvation — that comes also, that is derivative — but the business 
is to be built into the image and stature — not like a little 
dwarf, not a little lean resemblance to Christ ; but into the 
fulness of Christ. Here is the end and aim. 

Now, manhood, in our modern phrase, is what was meant 
anciently, and in the New Testament, by righteousness. Right- 
ness, in the Old and New Testaments, is declared to have been 
the aim of God in the working upon the human soul. The 
ideal differs, and the means differ ; but the aim of Christianity 
is the production of a manhood which fits one for this life, 
and which then fits him for a higher spiritual life. It is Christ- 
building, soul-building ; it is the production in a man of those 
conditions which reflect, only with lesser light and smaller in 



A Christian Life, 163 

compass, the Divine nature itself. And everything is good or 
bad just in the proportion in which it contributes to this end. 
Now, in school a dullard has to be whipped; that is a means 
of education to him. Yet whipping is not a part of education. 
Better be whipped than be for ever a fool. If a boy has intel- 
ligence, quickness, and application, he won't want the whip ; 
he will do better without it ; but it is better that he should be 
chastised than that he should remain in the bondage of 
ignorance. 

And there are a great many things in God's discipline with 
men in this world that are not themselves of the nature of 
grace, and are only relatively good, and only relatively good to 
certain persons or certain stages of human experience and 
development. Rather than that men should go to the worst, 
many things, like medicine, are better, but they are not good 
for daily bread. Men desire that work upon the human soul 
should be with as little human agency as possible, and I am 
afraid that I shall offend the prejudices of a great many men 
who have been educated in the old-fashioned theology, as if I 
had underrated the agency of the spirit of God in the work of 
human salvation. I do not. I differ from you if you have 
been brought up so, not so much by giving up my faith in the 
efficient activity of the mind of God upon the human soul, as 
enlarging it. It is the more, not the less, if I am heterodox ; 
for I believe that the Divine mind is out and at work upon 
everything in creation, and all the time without cessation upon 
low and upon high, and that the unfolding gradually going on 
in creation is an unfolding like the advance of Spring from the 
growing heat of the sun which brings in Summer ; so every step 
of unfolding in human history has been through the attraction 
and ripening of the Sun of Righteousness among the affairs of 
men. When, therefore, I shall seem to speak of the work of 
edification and sanctification as if it were from human causes — 
as it is, all human causes have their spring in the Divine soul 
which is the source of power, and without it they are nothing 
— it is not to set aside the idea that the Holy Spirit is the 
efficient agency in a man's calling and in his conversion and in 
his final salvation, but to show that the action of the Divine 
mind is so large and so continuous that we need not look after 
that, but only after those subordinate instrumentalities which 
He works in us, for He teaches us to work with Him — to work 
out our own salvation. To speak of a man's own will, of the 
instrument and of the character, the drift and the nature of 



164 The Atmosphere of 

these things which result in true conscience and edification, is 
not to set aside God's efficient influence ; it simply indicates 
the method of God's work upon the human soul. 

Now, in looking over the organisation of the human soul, 
there are different classes of faculties, and each of them, I 
suppose, in the sight of God is treated differently according to 
its own nature. God's natural world treats stone as it does 
not treat plants ; God's providential administration deals with 
plants by laws that do not pertain to animal life ; and in the 
providence of God He deals with the lower animals as He 
does not with human life ; and in regard to the human life He 
deals with the lower, savage, brutal, barbaric forms, as He does 
not with the higher, unfolded and Christian forms. That is 
to say, the mind of God works upon the highest qualities that 
have been evolved in His providence in all the outward world. 
The lower and yet indispensable appetites and passions of 
mankind produce and sustain life in this earthly stage ; upon 
them no moral character can be built. That is what Paul 
means in the eighth of Romans — much misinterpreted, much 
misunderstood, I think. There have been, during long periods 
in history, and there are still, widely prevalent ideas in regard 
to what is manly and heroic. It used to be thought that 
power, strength, muscle, courage— yea, deceit, craft, cunning 
— were the elements of manhood ; that was before any high 
moral conception existed in the world. Little by little these 
things have taken a lower rank ; these have seen growing 
up round about them qualities that were superior to them ; 
and yet these basilar faculties in man existed and are neces- 
sary to our earthly condition ; but they are not moral 
qualities, and out of them you cannot frame a character which 
shall please God. The operation of appetites and passions 
in so far as they minister to the earthly existence of this body 
are all very well ; but in so far as constituting morality and 
virtue and the higher forms of inspiration — they are nothing. 
They produce and sustain life in this earthly stage, but no 
moral character can be built upon them. Thus we read 
explicitly : " Because the carnal mind " — oh, you think the 
carnal mind means the mind before conversion. No such 
thing. It is the mind, or that part of the mind that belongs 
to man as an animal ; it is the appetites and the passions that 
belong to the lower nature of man as an animal, and out of 
which higher faculties have been developed. And in that 
state and by these qualities " the carnal mind is enmity against 



A Christian Life. 165 

God : it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." 
Go out into a pasture where there are roaring bulls and read 
the ten commandments to them ; how much do you suppose 
they will care for it ? Go and read the ten commandments to 
rocks, to vegetables, to lions, to tigers, or to that in man that 
has any analogy to the animal life. They are subject, these lower 
elements of human nature, to the moral law. " The carnal 
mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of 
God, neither indeed can be.'' The moral law cannot touch 
appetites and passions. " So, then, they that are in the flesh," 
that is to say, living in their animal instincts and passions, 
"cannot please God." Those lower faculties have nothing in 
them that either worships, or recognises or feels inspiration 
or unfolds in the direction of heavenly-mindedness. The 
qualities that do this are much higher up. The social 
affections come next, and they have a sphere, and they have 
functions in society, in this life, and also the beginnings of 
higher spiritual qualities foreshadowed in them. The passions 
are the things that help a man to live in his body and in the 
material world ; the social qualities are those that help him to 
live in society, among his fellow-men, and they have in them 
also the elements of self-sacrifice, the elements of kindness 
and gentleness ; but in their lower forms they are not to be 
compared for a moment with those higher, silent, heroic 
qualities that Christ produces in the soul. Then at last come 
moral and spiritual qualities in the unfolded man ; conscience 
by which, when properly trained, we desire and appreciate 
right and wrong ; and then in their blessed order, faith, hope, 
love. These are the inspirations by which we are spiritually at 
length enfranchised ; and when a man has come to a life of 
love, hope, faith, conscious rectitude, that very moment he has 
escaped the bondage of the flesh and is Christ's free man. 
These qualities constitute the working forces of the soul in 
fashioning the Christian character ; or in other words let me 
say, the qualities that are employable and are regarded in the 
New Testament as peculiarly Christian are all of them of the 
higher order, hope, joy, faith, and other co-ordinate qualities 
of which I shall speak in the sequel. 

Christianity is luminous. The life of the Christian is a life ; 
not a drudgery, not of the lower, not of the changeable and 
intermediate motives and qualities ; but that is the Christian 
element in education and experience which springs from recti- 
tude — the rectitude of love, that carries with it the light of 



1 66 The Atmosphere of 

hope, that carries with it the foresight and intuition of faith 
itself. And these qualities are not only the fruit of the spirit of 
God in men ; not only are they the efficient native forces in 
the regeneration of men and in their redemption from the flesh 
and in their perfection in the spirit life through Jesus Christ, 
but they are, all of them, I had almost said, gay, sparkling with 
peace and rest and joy ; and true Christianity, instead of groan- 
ing, triumphs ; instead of being gloomy, it is radiant ; instead 
of fearing, it hopes all things, and endures all things ; and to be 
a Christian is the happiest conceivable form of existence in 
this mortal life. These qualities are all joy-inspiring. They 
are not simply promises of joy to come, though they are that ? 
but by their actual experience they give the highest joys that 
are known to mankind. The lower qualities in men may suffer 
in the experience of time, but the others, joy in the Holy 
Ghost, in our affinities with God by the Holy Spirit, such as 
that we live by faith, live above the flesh, live by moral intuition, 
live by -love, these are constantly fountains of joy in this life. 

The Christian idea has been adulterated and poisoned by 
passing through the ascetic atmosphere. Well, and what is 
the ascetic ? It might almost be said that asceticism is the 
atmosphere of vinegar, it is an atmosphere of sharpness and 
sourness, it is an atmosphere the opposite to saccharine. The 
saccharine is the sugar atmosphere, and asceticism is the vine- 
gar atmosphere. The true Christian looks at everything 
through the hopeful, the joyful, the radiant ; and the ascetic 
looks at everything through the murky, the muddy, the sour, 
and the hard. The true Christian thinks that the experience of 
religion is an experience radiant of victory ; the ascetic thinks 
that to be a Christian you must be dragged at the heels of all 
the texts in the Bible that speak of the experience of men in 
this world in a kind of bondage and mournful captivity ; that 
tears are better than smiles, and pain is better than health, and 
that everything in this world that tends to make men happier 
is to be suspected. 

And this does not simply belong to the school of the ascetic ; 
it has drifted and suffered itself to become a kind of atmo- 
sphere ; and the average Christian experience has in it a large 
shading of asceticism borrowed from the old ascetics. Who 
were they ? and where did they get their impulse ? They got 
their impulse from a false interpretation of Scripture. That 
Scripture teaches that our first parents fell there can be no 
doubt. After that it is man's work. Then they go on to say 



A Christian Life. 167 

that the whole human race fell too ? Where is the text ? 
Where is the teaching ? What prophet, what evangelist, what 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ever taught that ? But it has 
come down in the catechisms and in the creeds of Christianity 
not only that our first parents fell by their transgression, but 
that in consequence of their fall the curse passed upon the 
whole human family, and that there has not been a man made 
right from that day to this. What sort of a god do you present, 
then ? If in the fall of the family the consequences rested 
upon them that transgressed, we should have no legal objection 
to such a sentence ; but to say that the unborn millions that 
had no part nor lot in the transgression of our first parents were 
to suffer degradation and annihilation, as it were, in conse- 
quence of a sin that they never committed nor gave any consent 
to is to establish an idea of justice that would turn heaven into 
tyranny and God into a malefactor. 

But that is not the worst of it. That after such an imputa- 
tion of sin that men knew nothing about, God should have 
gone on and turned the crank of creation, and multiplied 
them, and multiplied them, and multiplied them, swarming the 
earth with them in every generation — why, what would you 
think of a doctor who should go about inoculating men with 
mad-dogism, in this world ? How long would you let him 
stay ? How long would you let a man with small-pox wander 
up and down ? But suppose a man were to create it, and 
should be suffered to go into society ! All the instincts of 
justice, all the humanities, rise up against the continued crea- 
tion of inevitable and unbounded evil. Yet men have been 
taught by the ascetic mediaeval and scholastic theology that 
God has done it, and on the pattern of infinity. 

But then it would not have been so bad if there had fol- 
lowed at once remedial influences. But for ten thousand 
years the great bulk of the human family have been without a 
Sabbath or a Bible, or a missionary, or a prophet, or a teacher, 
or a minister. How is Africa to-day ? What care is taken of 
its population ? And so look upon the monstrous and infernal 
doctrine that has been foisted into Christian beliefs, that our 
God that bowed His head rather than that men should die is 
Himself the author of death and the propagation of it, and has 
made it part and parcel of Nature, changed the whole organi- 
sation of Nature, created men, ranks and degrees beyond the 
power of arithmetic, and for what ? Because their forefather- 
sinned ! 



1 68 The Atmosphere of 

Well, now, from this begging of facts, from this unluminous 
and murky statement of facts that never happened, but which 
were adopted by the school of ascetic theologians, have come 
the derivative inference — namely, that if man, by reason of 
Adam's transgression, had become thoroughly corrupted in 
every part of his own nature, then the natural action of reason, 
the natural action of the affections, the natural action of the 
moral qualities themselves, is all impure and sinful. That is 
the inference that must be drawn ; and, if so, then there comes 
the practical form of it, that every man in this world is bound 
to resist these malign tendencies of Nature, and that conscience 
is a perverter, that joy is a perversion, and that the sweet 
affinities of life are all of them to be given up in the hope that 
by-and-by we can find them in heaven at compound interest ; but 
here they are bad. There is a natural love of neatness, I hope, 
among most people in civilised lands ; the ascetic went nasty 
because he thought he must resist those tendencies of taste ; 
they were of Nature, of spoilt humanity, and he would have 
grace in heaven in proportion as he had filth on earth. And so 
men have gone on one after the other, putting out the bright 
stars through which God has sought to lead the race onward 
and upward. This view of the ascetic, that the world fell by 
its own transgression — I believe in that- 1 — was not enough ; but 
it was corrupted by the idea that God Himself continued to 
propagate a race that had gone down and that had not been 
extinguished; that He went on producing animalism, and 
animalism, and animalism. If, then, all the natural and en- 
nobling tendencies of the human mind were, according to the 
ascetic theology, merely "of the earth, earthy"; if there is 
nothing in this world that is not to be suspected and put down ; 
if we are to have our whole indulgences of joy and pleasure 
after we get out of this hospital world, you will see why it is 
that, to a very large extent, modifications of asceticism prevail 
in the popular ideas with respect to religion. 

The world lieth in corruption and wickedness, not by man's 
actual transgression and perversion of self — that is the ascetic 
teaching. We believe that men have perverted their way 
individually voluntarily, and that men follow the flesh rather 
than the spirit ; we believe they do it of their full, free choice, 
that they do it when the motives to the other thing are multi- 
tudinous, recognised, pressing. There is no difference of 
opinion as to the sinfulness of man. In the carrying of this 
amazingly complex nature of ours ; we constantly mistake ; and 



A Christian Life 169 

there are infinite infirmities which are violations of law, but 
not culpable ; and we have a High Priest who can be touched 
with a feeling of our infirmities. All the violations of law 
that were not intentional disobediences, that came from weak- 
ness, from bias, from example, from ignorance — those are in- 
firmities, though they are violations of law. All sin is violation 
of law, but all violation of law is not sin. When a man walking 
in the street meets a neighbour, and smites him in the face, 
and lands him in the gutter, that is a violation of law both 
civil and Divine ; but when a three-year-old child, being dis- 
appointed, slaps its nurse, that is a violation of law, but you 
do not knock the child into the gutter — you treat him very 
differently from that. He did not know, he merely acted on 
an impulse, not on an experience. So there are multitudes of 
things of the same kind. The race is learning its trade, and 
all apprentices have to make mistakes on the way to learning. 
So in this world, with such wonderful instruments in the minds 
of men as we have, the knowledge of how to use them is very 
little ; and those that are neglected, not educated, that have 
nobody to take care of them, learn almost not at all, very 
slowly, anyhow, and only outwardly. But Christian nature 
teaches the child how to use his temper, how to use his likes 
and dislikes, how to use the whole economy that is inside him, 
and so, little by little, he overcomes the lower and grosser 
forms of Nature, and brings conscience and the higher spiritual 
traits into the ascendancy. There is no difference, therefore, 
between one and another school as to the reality of sinfulness, 
and that it is universal, and that every man from the cradle up 
sins, partly by his own fault, largely by his ignorance, largely 
by infirmities, by want of knowledge. 

Now, as to the restorative process, we hold that sorrow and 
pain are better than the fruits of sin which are produced if 
these are not applied as medicine. Sorrow and suffering may 
be made instruments of reformation — nay, of manhood, We 
find in the experience of life that not they that are freest from 
all embarrassments make the best men. The child brought up 
to hardship, without effort, with a strong will discerning here 
and there slowly the right way, but by indomitable patience 
hews out his prosperity, and at last comes, through wealth and 
good citizenship, to stand on his feet — we say that is a man 
self-made, educated by adversity. He is strong, and the winds 
cannot overthrow him, and the floods cannot sweep out the 
foundations from under him. There is the ministration of 



170 The Atmosphere of 

sorrow that is to advantage ; but, on the other hand, sorrow is 
not the type of Christianity. When a man has wrenched a 
bone asunder and goes to the hospital, and the surgeon brings 
back the crackling bones and bandages them, and the man lies 
upon his back for a time, and at last upon crutches is permitted 
to go about his daily business, little by little restoring the limb 
that was smashed, we perfectly understand that the painful 
treatment is simply relative to the recovering from an accident. 
No man ever says that crutches are better for a healthy man 
than nothing ; nobody ever says that, in order to restore a leg, 
pain that is necessary is a great evil ; it is a great benefit. But 
broken legs and broken bones and crutches are not the type of 
healthy manhood. So, when a man is sick by disturbance of 
interior arrangements, he loathes food, his head swims, fever 
beats in every vein, and he takes nauseous medicine, a good 
deal of it usually. Yet nobody wants to have medicine about 
his table as a dish, as if it were the best thing a man could 
eat every day. It is good relative to recovery from a worse 
state, but not to set forth a type. In the ministration of God's 
Providence in this world, tears and heartbreak, and all forms 
of moral or social suffering are good for what they do to a man 
who is sick or out of the way, but when he is brought by 
suffering into some affinity with the right way, suffering is not 
the type of the right way, but joy, peace, hope. We are saved 
by hope ; we are saved by the finer instincts and finer influ- 
ences of the human soul ; not by the dread, the captivity, the 
bondage, the crutch, the odious medicines. 

The ascetic view has not merely confined itself to a 
theoretical statement, it has affected the experience of the 
Church. Partly it has been rejected, partly it has been 
retained, and I affirm that true religion, as over against the 
ascetic, is not a thing either of tears, or of sorrow, or of suffer- 
ing, or of deprivation, but that no man comes up into the 
fullest position and freedom of his own mind until he has 
submitted the animal life to the government of his higher moral 
nature, and that higher moral nature lives in a perpetual 
inspiration and direct personal contact with the mind and will 
of God, and then the atmosphere of a man's soul is not that 
of clouds and storms ; but religion truly attained brings a man 
into the largest liberty and into the sweetest light, both in 
regard to daily experience and yet more in regard to that 
unfolding experience that lies beyond vision and beyond 
knowledge. 



A Christian Life. 171 

So far from it being true that a man is called by religion into 
bondage, it is the reverse. No man is so much in bondage as 
the man without religion. No man is so far from the highest 
quality of himself as the man who is living on the pleasures of 
the day as they go by. There is no liberty like that of 
obedience to God's laws. 

That is true of the law of gravitation. A man builds a mill 
on the falls, and the falling torrent turns his wheel, and the 
law of gravitation is that which he employs. He has found 
out what it is ; he puts it to work and makes a slave of it ; 
instead of grinding his corn in the old-fashioned way, by his 
muscles, the law of gravitation does it for him. He has sub- 
mitted himself to the natural force, and what does he get ? 
Service. Once, when the electric currents were flashed in the 
North, they were dreaded in the storm ; they were phenomena 
of beauty or terror ; but we have found out a good deal about 
electricity, we have found out its nature, much of it, and what 
do we do now ? We say, " Serve us," and it gives light to our 
dwellings and casts its beam down upon our streets. We say- 
to it, " Go under the sea," and away it goes. We have made a 
postboy of that which savage men yet dread and did not know 
what to do with. The moment men know what it is, and 
submit themselves to its necessary conditions, it turns right 
round and serves them, and they are as much stronger as the 
whole strength of the natural law. When a man stands at 
defiance with natural law of any kind, higher or lower, to that 
degree he weakens himself; but when he throws his life along^ 
the plane of any known law, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or 
any other, he takes to himself the energy of the law which he- 
obeys, and obedience, instead of being circumscription, is 
enlargement — it is power, it is the energy that the other life 
pours on the wheels of this life. 

Therefore discard the idea that to become a Christian is to 
diminish a man's pleasures. It changes them, it does not 
diminish them, except where the man undertakes to do both, 
things. A man that sneers out of doors and holds his tongue 
indoors has not a very good time. A man that is vulgar with 
the vulgar and seeks to be refined with the refined has a hard 
time of it. A man that is honest among honest folks and a. 
cheat among all the rest has a very divided experience, I take it. 
You can be one thing or the other ; it is very hard to mix them. 
When a man undertakes to be religious in his creed, and goes, 
through a certain sort of awakening, conviction, and conversion^ 



172 The Atmosphere of 

and when taken into the church says : "There, I have got my 
insurance fixed all up, I have got my charter ; no matter what 
happens, I shall be saved hereafter, I am elected, I have the 
evidences." God be gracious ! Well, if that is salvation ; if 
it is a mere mechanical exterior thing, so that a man can go on 
and be no better than he was before — why should he be ? He 
is saved, he has got all fixed ; but if his salvation is by the 
power of God's Spirit, the transformation of a man's nature 
from a lower plane to a higher plane — if it is the unfolding of the 
man himself into the image of God, into His love and His 
power, that is a very different thing. A man can have stages of 
attainment, but a man cannot serve God and Mammon both 
with heart and will at the same time. You have got to be good 
or you have got to be bad voluntarily. Choose ye whom ye 
will serve — if the Lord be God, serve Him ; if Baal, serve him, 
and take the consequences of the allegiance on the one side or 
on the other. But if a man means to take the allegiance of 
God, the Holy Ghost, the power of the world to come, all the 
effluence of the Holy Spirit on the souls of men, and if his life 
is one of faith and love and joy and patience, long-suffering, 
gentleness, goodness — if that is his choice, then I declare that 
the pleasures of men in this world are just in the proportion in 
which they live denying their lower nature and living primarily 
in their higher nature. 

There is no manhood like that of a true Christian man. A 
woman in poverty, in pain of body, and in bitterness of soul, 
sitting in an unlighted hovel singing to her babe, while her 
drunken husband, riotous, rude, and cruel, holds over her the 
perpetual fear of her very life or of her child's life — can there 
be any spectacle more sad than this ? Yet up through the 
night air go her songs; she knows in whom she has trusted; 
she caste her burden on the Lord; she lives in the darkness 
illumined only by faith ; she hopes and lives on, and hopes 
and loves, and loves the unlovely, and -.vhen this beast that has 
wallowed by her side in all his filthiness at last dies, and all 
men say, " Thank God he is gone," she sheds tears and is the 
only one creature this side of angels that mourns over the 
miserable, the fallen, and the dead ; and as God looks down on 
that spectacle and sees the bravery, and the purity, and the 
faith, and the love, and the fidelity and patience, is there out 
of heaven another spectacle that is more heroic and more 
beautiful than the enduring love of the wife and mother ? The 
exaltations of men lie not in their outward conditions, not in 



A Christian Life. 173 

the praises of men, but in the qualities of their own nature, in 
the lines of light and knowledge by which they live ; and he 
that becomes a Christian and lives in the heroic mood of 
Christianity stands highest, is best prepared to meet the buffet- 
ings of misfortune, can live in cheer and patience and hope ; 
and dying, angels flock in blessed multitudes to see who shall 
bear the ransomed spirit up. Angel processions largely lie at 
the door of the chastened poor, and few and far between, I 
fear, are those that are in competition for the souls of rich men, 
whose riches have dragged them down, through all their self- 
indulgences, like lead to the bottom. 

This subject throws light on the matter of care. We are 
commanded to cast our burdens on the Lord ; we are com- 
manded to be without care. We go through the experience 
of care at the beginning, but we overcome it and subdue it by 
the power of our faith. Have we not One that knows all 
things ? Have we not One that tenderly loves us ? If we have 
put ourselves into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ, why 
should we carry our own burdens ? And yet how many per- 
sons there are that hardly think it- necessary to make this a 
part of their religion ! They are burdened with care in its 
frets, its attritions, its anxieties, its subjugations — care and fret, 
care and fret ! And when the minister says, " It is your 
privilege as a Christian to live above that sordid care," 
they say, "Oh yes, it is very well for you to stand in the 
pulpit and tell us about care, but if you were in our place and 
had to work for your daily bread under our sharp adversities 
perhaps you would preach another song." Well, very likely I 
should be as bad and foolish as you, but that would not make 
you right, and it would not make me right. There is a pro- 
vision in God's promises and providence to lift men above 
care. You are not living for yourself, you are not living in 
your own house. The world is God's house, and He has 
promised to sustain you. 

I never knew a man that was not sustained in life as long as 
he lived. He may sustain himself and do it in a beggarly way. 
But you are to say day by day : " This is the revelation of 
God's will respecting me. He wants me to have this 
trouble, and therefore I want it • He wants me to have this 
burden, and therefore I will carry it ; I am doing it for Him." 
My children, as I stand by them and watch their athletic 
games, put themselves to stress — they run, they cast heavy 
weights, they develop their power — and I glory in it, and they 



174 The Atmosphere of 

glory to see me glory in it. But we are all Christ's soldiers 
under drill, and some men learn by suffering, some by the 
absence of suffering, and God knows what each man needs in 
order to bring out the subtle, divine, and eternal element of 
his nature. Therefore men that are Christians and ought to 
be luminous, why should they sink back and give the world 
the impression that a Christian has just as much care, and 
sometimes more care, than anybody else ? Ah ! all that 
is well so far as the wear and tear of domestic and common 
life is concerned ; but when the staff and the stay is removed, 
when the heart that flows and flows has no object to fill, when 
that cradle is empty and the little feet no longer echo on the 
stairs, how awful the silence of the house that once was popu- 
lous, and how men that fretted because the children in their 
romping games filled the house with confusion, when they are 
gone, say, amid fast-dropping tears : " I would the children 
were back again ; how desolate the house is without them ! " 
How many are there in this life who have found all their joy 
gone out ? If I had taken my children and thrown them into 
the gulf of forgetfulness, I should myself feel the weights of 
sorrow. Once and again and again and again I have stood by 
the open grave and heard the angels saying : " I know whom 
ye seek ; they are not here, they are risen," and I have 
learned, trained by the Spirit of God, to look upon sorrow 
and trouble as so much scouring for brightness, so much 
polishing that I may be made beautiful in the sight of God ; 
that my life is not here, that it is " hid with Christ in God," 
and when He shall appear my life shall appear with Him. 
And as to the care and bruises and maltreatment of life, its 
ups and its downs, only once feel that the hand of the Lord 
is dealing with and fashioning you, how blessed all these things 
become ! When the sculptor stands before a block of marble, 
I can imagine that the unlucent and unintelligent stone might 
say : " I was promised to be made a godlike figure and put 
into a public niche to be admired, yet here, day by day, there is 
a rude, brutal fellow with his sharp chisel and heavy mallet 
knocking off pieces from me, and when he has got down so 
that even my form appears, still he is knocking my face and 
cutting me here and there." That is the way that works of 
art are made. It is by things that they lose that the features 
come out and their proportions are made to appear. God is 
a great artist. And if there are any of you that are to be statues 
in the niches of heaven, God, probably, is chiselling you, and 



A Christian Life. 175 

you ought, at least, by this time, to understand something 
about God's dealings with you; that by your care, by your 
burdens, by your sorrows, and by your losses, He is teaching 
you that this world is not your home, and that the other life 
is; that you are not fit for it yet, and He is, as it were, 
like a sculptor, unburdening you of the superfluous stone that 
is in you, and letting out the lineaments and beauty of your 
hidden life. 

Christian friends, oh ! preach the gospel of joy, preach the 
gospel of fortitude, preach the gospel of hope, preach the 
gospel of victory. Day by day let men hear the language of 
joy from your lips. As it is, how many are led to be Christians 
because they see how cheerfully and happily you live ? It is 
getting to be almost a matter of bargain and sale : " I am 
going to heaven because I have got the promises, I am going 
to heaven because I have closed in with the terms of salva- 
tion '' — so you have learned from your theology. You are 
in the church, and living about as well as other folks live, and 
that is the ground of your hope in heaven — that you are going 
through the hopper somehow or other, and coming out in the 
bag as flour on the other side. Let not such be your ambition, 
for He whom you follow is worthy of better service. He who 
loves and lives for me watches over all the events of my life, 
and my history deserves something better at my hands than 
this mechanical conformity to an exterior condition of salvation. 
My heart, my life, my hope, my purpose, all that I am and all 
that I have — He is worthy of them all. And the atmosphere 
of my life ought to be an atmosphere, luminous, beautiful, 
triumphant. Your time is short. A few more weary months, 
and you that are most distressed will be free. You that are 
youngest, it is but a few years that you will have to bear the 
pitiless storm of time and its temptation. Or ever we imagine the 
voice will come, and you will be called home ; and in that day, 
when you stand before Him — Him of the cross — the cross that 
taught you that love suffers, and suffers for the unworthy — 
when you stand in the forefront of heaven, and with illumined 
eye discern the meaning of the universe and your life in it, of 
all the sadness that will for the moment come across you will 
be the sadness in looking back upon the poor, miserable, 
poverty-stricken life that you have lived upon earth ; and if, 
then, lifted above it and the memory of it, you enter into the 
royal presence, of all the glory that ever entered into the mind 
to conceive the glory of disinterested living and service will 



176 The Atmosphere of a Christian Life 

seem the most radiant, as it will be the most endless. God- 
grant, then, that the atmosphere of Christ in you may be an 
atmosphere of hope, of cheer, of joy and rejoicing; and "let 
your light so shine that men shall see your good works, and 
glorify your Father which is in heaven." 



PAUL'S IDEA OF THE CROSS. 



"And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of 
speech, or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I 
determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him 
crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much 
trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words 
of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power : That 
your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of 
God." — i Corinthians ii. i — 5. 

PAUL'S writings are full of egotism. When it used to be 
thought that Paul was the author of Hebrews I am 
sure that critics had never counted " I " — the " IV that were 
in the other known epistles of Paul • they never counted 
" me," " mine " ; they never had counted how many times the 
personal pronoun is to be found in all his known and acknow- 
ledged letters. It is impossible for Paul to dissociate his own 
personality from the things he is speaking of; and it is 
a characteristic such that the moment you once notice it you 
never can escape from the sense of it again. In Hebrews 
there is but one personal pronoun, and that is towards the 
close, and it might have been uttered by anybody. It is as 
impossible that the Apostle Paul could have written Hebrews 
as it is that I could talk in Hebrew. And if there is anything 
offensive among men it is egotism. A man that is always 
talking about himself is a nuisance ; it takes a great amount 
of simplicity and child-likeness for a man to talk much about 
himself without being disagreeable to the whole company. Now 
and then there is a luminous, simple-hearted man that can do 
it, but as a general thing egotism is a discord everywhere. Yet 



178 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

I would not have had one single " I," " me," " mine " taken 
out of Paul's letters— no, not for all the world. It is one of 
the most admirable features of his writings — the simplicity of 
his egotism. For note, if you please, that Paul was not Paul. 
There was not much left of Paul ; Paul was made over. You 
will find in that wonderful passage in Galatians, in the 
second chapter and the 20th verse, Paul says : " I am crucified 
with Christ, nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in 
me : and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the 
faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for 
me." " All my personality, all that I think of or that exists 
consciously in me is that which is the product and represen- 
tative of the work of God in my soul." The philosophy of 
his teaching, the richest and deepest, was this : he saw the 
truth on every side as it was in Christ Jesus ; and he took it 
into himself so that when he says " I " he does not mean Paul 
— the old Paul, but the transfigured Paul, the Paul that has 
come into such sympathy with Jesus Christ that what he is 
saying is the echo of the Holy Ghost in him and the voice of 
God in him. There is a great meaning, which I am not going to 
follow up now, in the personality of a man that preaches — there 
is great meaning in that, which I mention and pass by. It is 
that of God which is in us and is our actual dispositional life 
that has in it the power for our preaching. A man that is a 
hard, proud man may preach the Gospel of love technically, but 
he does not preach it ; and a good deal of the preaching to- 
day is like a score of music which a man cannot play, but he 
can call off the letters on the scale as if he were playing it ; but 
that is not the music. And the truth of the Bible must be 
interpreted into a living consciousness in onr own souls ; the 
deepest and sweetest truth must become personal to us and 
then take on the form of our disposition, in some the philo- 
sophic form, in some the dramatic form, in some the aesthetic 
form, and in some various domestic relations : all these 
elements are the living preaching, not the text, not the deduc- 
tion of the truth from it, not the systematisation of the truth, 
not the organisation of doctrine and the clear statement of it, 
the pedantic external piety, that is not preaching. That may 
be theologising and there may be a place for that, but the 
pulpit is not the place, preaching means one's ow r n self. 
There is a sense in w r hich a man ought not to preach himself 
but Jesus Christ, and there is another sense in which he cannot 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 179 

preach Jesus Christ unless he preaches himself. " Christ in 
me the hope of glory " is the subject matter of true preaching. 

Now, the biographical feature of the apostle is not simply a 
matter of literary interest, it is matter of profound importance. 
When St. Paul says : " I am not ashamed to preach the Gospel 
to you also," Romans, why need he be ashamed ? And that 
passage is in close affinity with this, why need he be ashamed ? 
Are you ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ? Oh no. What is 
it to-day? A Gospel that has triumphed over barbarism, that 
has gone far to extinguish slavery, that has turned the old 
civilisation bottom side up, whose churches now stand where 
old temples stood, which has become even fashionable, where 
all society and those that would have its favour do congregate. 
Who would be ashamed of the Gospel in a cathedral or in 
ornate churches with an organ behind the minister and sweet 
singers round about the choir leader? Who would be 
ashamed of that ? But in the old day when it was merely the 
off-scouring of the world that was preaching it, a miserable 
Jew, and every temple in every city was against it, and every 
Government, imperial, world-controlling, was against it, when 
all literature and all philosophy, and everything were against 
it, it was a very different thing to preach the Gospel and say : 
"I am not ashamed of it." Now it is a harvest-field, then it 
was ploughing and seed-sowing. 

The senses were absolutely, all of them, in favour of old 
heathenism; all architecture spoke of it, the temples were 
symbols of it, the power of organisation was on the side of 
heathenism, the sway of the world was in the hands of men 
that were pagan. From the equator to the pole, there was no 
Gospel or any symbolisation of it, everything visible and 
sensuous, which is the accustomed method of producing ideas 
and feelings among mankind, was on the side of Rome and of 
Athens ; and yet with all its beautifulness, the hectic of pros- 
perity was on the cheek of consumptive ' Empires ; both Rome 
and Greece were perishing when they seemed most powerful 
and most beautiful. 

Now Paul came at this time with everything in the world 
against him, and I want you to take notice, if you follow me 
through this biography that he gives of himself, of how he 
strips himself of all the forces ordinarily relied upon for success 
in this life. " I come to you not with excellency of speech " 
— yet that is the road to conviction. That is what is studied 



180 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

in courts, colleges, in the forum ; everywhere excellency of 
speech combining, in the mere putting forth of ideas, the 
beauty and the logical connection of ideas. There is very 
much that depends upon wisdom of utterances, and there 
never was a time when speech was so much in fashion, and 
when the want of it was almost a degradation, as in the very day 
and nation where Paul was ; and yet Paul says deliberately : 
" When I undertook the work of the Gospel I laid aside all 
that — I would not have anything to do with it. I came not to 
you with excellency of speech, rhetoric, poetry, eloquence, the 
art of the forum — I turn that aside." " Nor of wisdom," 
which is philosophy. The whole world was then resounding 
with Plato, with Aristotle, with Socrates, and with their 
minimised disciples, the Sophists ; and there were sects almost 
as many amongst the philosophers as there have since been 
among the churches ; everything was split up into innumerable 
sects. Paul looked upon all the methods by which men drew 
disciples to themselves ; he looked upon both the philosopher 
and the rhetorician and said : " I would have none of them, I 
would not try either of those methods to bring disciples to the 
cause of Christ, I determined not to know anything among 
you save Jesus Christ." Not that we mean by that that Paul 
himself talked only on that one topic ; he is not speaking of 
the topics of discourse ; he is upon the force that lay behind 
the topic. The force by which he expected to drive home 
conviction was in Jesus Christ. " I determined to rely on no 
other fountain ; all the stream of my exertion should flow out 
of the teaching of the nature and the power and the beauty, 
and the glory of Jesus Christ — that is the fountain from which 
I expected the power to turn the whole machinery of the 
Church, I determined not to know anything among you but 
Jesus ; I did not determine to know the power of rhetoric, I 
did not determine to know the power of ratiocination ; I did 
not depend upon learning, I depended upon the subtle spirit 
which is in Jesus Christ," of which he goes on to speak. " I 
determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus 
Christ, and Him crucified." " I determined not to know even 
Jesus Christ except as He is presented in His suffering and in 
His death." Now, when you come to analyse these things in 
connection with the reigning public sentiment, that is an 
extraordinary avowal, and he follows it up by saying : " I was, 
I know, poor, feeble, and helpless myself; I was in weakness 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 181 

and much trembling among you ; I was not arrogant ; I had 
not any great expectations of myself" — and certainly he had 
no need to, for he was a poor thing himself. But there is that 
in his thought about Christ, not as poetry has since made Him 
out ; not as He has now been expounded to us ; not as He has 
come from fathers' and mothers' lips ; not as sung in hymns ; 
not from the crystallised experience of ages ; but Jesus Christ 
as He stood confronted over against those reigning ideas of 
paganism — " I desire to know nothing but Him ; and when I 
come to speak of Jesus Christ I desire to know nothing but 
this fact — that He suffered and died." 

Well, what had Paul with which to meet, then, the organised 
civilisation ? The poetised deities, gorgeous temples on every 
side, robed priests and educational associations of youth and 
manhood were all round about him, and what had he to 
present, and who was he that was going to present? Look 
what Paul was himself. A Jew — a detested nation, as they 
have been since, hated, probably, above all men that ever 
lived upon the earth. The hereditary Jew has come down 
like a scapegoat of the ages, bearing the sins on his head — 
enough of his own — but bearing a good many race sins, too. 
And as to Paul, we have his own testimony, given in the 
second of Corinthians and the tenth chapter, of his own 
personal appearance. He was evidently a man of very small 
stature, and, as the legend is, of weak and watery eyes, and of 
a very faltering and imperfect utterance — whether it was 
stuttering or not authorities differ. But here was a vagabond 
Jew, mean, shrunk, peering out of watery eyes, and stammer- 
ing. That is all that there was of him, and he came to 
revolutionise the whole world. 

Bad enough to have sent a Jew to do it ; but he speaks of 
himself — there is no getting round it — as having a most insig- 
nificant appearance. He says of himself (2 Corinthians 
x. 10): "His letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; 
but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible." 
No Demosthenian here ; no Ciceronian here ; no great, 
glorious, developed man that looks like a god walking on 
earth, but a little, wrinkled, shrunk, black-haired, weak-eyed, 
stammering Jew, and he comes down to convert the world. 
And with all these disqualifications this specimen of feeble- 
ness was an exile. He was not a voluntary exile, as many of 
his countrymen were, seeking wealth all over the world and 



*82 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

employment ; but this man had gone out of the world with the 
heels of his countrymen as the force. He ran for life ; he was 
vomited out of Judasa, and was a Jew of the meanest appear- 
ance, springing from a nation the most detested of all nations 
on the earth, and himself expatriated, and expatriated by his 
own countrymen, and refused to be received by exiled Jews 
because he was not even fit for a foreign Jew's company. 
Can you get any lower than that? Is not there a grim 
humour in hearing such a one talking about what he did or 
did not rely on when he undertook to revolutionise the world 
to Christ ? 

Then, as to the Christ. Here were Grecian philoso- 
phers, aesthetics, worshippers of beauty, great philosophers that 
had the theory of the universe, and had their ideas of the 
true God, of power and symmetry, and eternal youth unvan- 
quished by time and unwasted by thought and endeavour, who 
sat supreme in the centre of the universe, and brought all 
things round about Him with royal submission and obeisance. 
All Nature had not symbols enough to represent the grandeur 
of their idea of divinity. And what is Paul ? What did he 
bring them and ask them to take in the place of this God? A 
convict Jew — that was his theme — a Jew who had been 
arrested by his own countrymen, born at the bottom of life ; 
born not only at the bottom of life among the poor and unin- 
structed, but born lower than that putatively ; for, while we are 
better instructed, they at that time and age could not hide 
from themselves that he was born without a father, and that the 
fault of his mother was covered up by the benignity and the 
kindness of Joseph — born below respectability. Is there any- 
thing to go lower than that ? And if he was to touch human 
nature from the foundation to its very altitude, could he have 
been born otherwise than at the bottom of life and at the bottom 
of virtue, that is to say, in the impressions produced upon society? 
We glorify Mary, and we have thrown overabout a fact of history 
such an aureole, such an interpretation spiritually, that we 
revere that which, to the unillumined eyes of the age in which 
Christ lived, seemed to be that he was born a bastard. That 
was the literal interpretation of it at that time. Here was a 
bastard Jew, not in reality, but as it was understood at that- 
time ; born in a carpenter's family, born in that very part of 
the nation where it was thought the lowest and most degraded 
Jews lived, working all his life long at menial occupations, not 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 183 

having had any education, so that when they heard him they 
marvelled, saying : " Where hath this man letters ? We know 
His brothers and sisters, they are with us, where did He get 
His wisdom ? " Could you pick out anything lower than that ? 
And yet that Jew, born under such doubtful circumstances, 
brought up in penury and poverty, without any salient influence 
during his lifetime, after twenty or thirty years became a self- 
inspired teacher, but was arrested by the hand of the authori- 
ties of His own country, and for the charge of treason, 
misleading the people, for a joint heresy against the state and 
against the Jewish church was crucified. He was appointed 
not only to be cut off from the people, but, studying the ways 
of death, they picked out the most odious and most detestable 
way, the one which civilised nations had agreed to be the 
very death of death, the ignominy of extinction, and He was 
crucified. 

Now, what a topic that was for such a man, for such a 
Divinity ! Was there ever such a text, and was there ever such 
a preacher as the vagabond Paul and the crucified Jesus ? And 
how well we might have supposed that he would have hid 
that, and that he would have given the very best and most 
luminous and winning explanation of the parentage of Jesus ; 
that he would have represented the cruelty of the accusations 
against Him, and that he would have smoothed it over and 
made Him at any rate a martyr to noble sentiments among 
the Jews; and that in every way he could he would have 
pushed aside those peculiar exhibitions of Christ's life. But 
what do we hear ? The voice of the sweet trumpet declaring : 
4C I determined not to know anything among you but Jesus, 
and Him I determined not to know except in the very act, and 
article, and ignominy, and wonder of crucifixion." "I would 
not hide that, nor glose it, nor explain it • I gloried in it." 
And all the way through Paul's writings you will see that the 
•cross was not synonymous, as it is in our modern phraseology, 
with deity. We talk yet about worshipping the cross, meaning 
Him that hung upon it. But the cross and Christ were two 
very different articles at that time. The cross meant shame, 
suffering, degradation, odiousness ; it was the symbol cf that 
which was the meanest, wickedest, slimiest, most detestable. 
There the enemies of mankind, dug out from the 
lower pools of society, expiated their hideous crimes and 
cruelties, and on that cross, with all the odium of it, Christ 



184 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

hung, and Paul says : " I take Him there ; I take Hirn ora 
the cross." 

Is there not some meaning in this ? Compare it, for exam- 
ple, with their ideas of Divinity ; and take this picture as a Jew- 
would represent it to his countrymen ; take this picture of a* 
discarded Jew who had died as a miserable criminal, an odious 
death after a parentage of more than doubtfulness, and under- 
took to put that in the niche of the gods, and to preach that, 
and carry it out in all the civilisation of the Greek nation.. 
Was there ever so hopeless a task as that ? Yet here is the 
enthusiasm, here is the glorying, here is the choral triumph of 
the Apostle, " I determined to know nothing but Him, and I 
determined not to know Him except in His degradation and 
suffering. I kissed the cross ; all the world reviled it ; I saw 
in it something that made it the dearest thing to me in 
human life." 

What was that something ? What was this to Paul ? Paul 
presented the sufferer as God to the Grecian world. Now 
the Greeks believed that their gods were never suffering. They 
lived in immortal youth ; and to be a god was to have power 
over circumstances, to drive away care, anxiety, and fear, and 
weakness ; to create, because they were gods, an endless 
circuit of enjoyment, of honour, and of privilege, and to live 
in a triumphant immortality. That was the Grecian idea of 
God ; and to present to them a god of humiliation, why the 
idea stumbled on the very threshold of reason. Yet Paul 
says : " This is the Divinity I wish to preach to you. Tumble 
your Jupiter out of your temple ; take away Minerva, take 
away Apollo, take away all the gods of finer feelings, as well 
as the whole ruck of penitentiary gods that exist in your 
mythology ; take them all away, and put up a vagabond Jew 
that was put to death for treason by his own countrymen, 
treason that was expiated on the cross ; I want you to enshrine 
that and call it God." Was there ever such an astounding 
proposition ? If you look on it from the outside it is " foolish- 
ness " yet : for the preaching of the cross is foolishness, Paul 
says. To them that understand it it is the wisdom of God 
and the power of God unto salvation. Not the cross, but that 
which the cross expresses, the interior sentiment. What a 
rebuke is this to-day ! to all those ideas of God which have 
come down to us from antiquity, unpurged, Pagan, that 
God is a Being who cannot suffer. Suffering runs through a 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 185, 

long scale in its possibility. There is the suffering which, 
springs from the violation of natural and material law — sick- 
nesses, diseases ; suffering that violates also the laws of 
human society — crimes, misdemeanours; sufferings which 
come from the violation of the ecomony of our own body 
and from the subtler laws that reign in human society among, 
the refined and the civilised and the excellent. These are all 
sufferings ; but the suffering of God certainly cannot be found 
in any of these departments. Find a being among men that 
cannot suffer. You cannot. A mother, for instance, that loves, 
her babe and sees it suffering : does she not suffer? Not 
because she has violated any law, or done anything dis- 
graceful. Love suffers, must suffer. It is the nature of love 
to suffer, that is, by sympathy ; it takes upon itself the burdens 
of those that are round about it ; it sees their misfortune, it. 
suffers with their transgression even, though not itself par- 
taking of the sinning element. In the higher realm of man- 
hood no man is fit to live in decent society that does not. 
know how to suffer ; not because he is a sinner, but because he 
is a saint. The higher up you go the broader becomes your 
sympathy in universal human life, and the more your sym- 
pathy of love extends itself the more it seeks to lift those who 
are round about you to the level of your ideals. The love is. 
very vulgar that only thinks and traffics. " You love me and 
I love you." What is that better than " Here is gold, give me 
some lace ; here is money, give me that picture " ? It is mere 
trafficking. " You don't love me, you don't care anything about, 
me, and I am not going to care anything about you.'' Here are. 
quarrels of love, here are the dramas written and unwritten, 
and there millions more unwritten than ever were written. 
Here is the scale. Is there not a love that is expressed by the 
Apostle, " Though the more I love the less am I loved, I 
glory in that ; I know I love more than you do ; I know that I 
am not much loved, that makes no difference ; you may not 
love me nor care for me, nor sympathise with me ; but I love 
you." It is the power of love without reciprocation. And the 
greatest natures have that power. They do not love faults or 
failings, but the people that bear them they love. And love 
takes its measure out of the soul from which it comes ; its 
magnitude, its purity, and its beauty are determined by the 
lover, not by the recipient. I may, of course, love lovely 
things, but that would sift the world and leave most of it 



s86 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

chaff and bran, and very little plump grain fit to love. If we 
are going to love we must learn to love things that are not 
iovely, yea, that are unamiable. 

Where is the motive for that ? In the divinity of love. 
There can be no true love such as ought to brood in the 
breast of God except that love that loves according to the 
measure of the lover, and not according to the qualities of 
the recipient. And if there is a God sitting in the heavens 
that cannot suffer, I am an infidel, an atheist. My bowing 
down of the head to the Almighty is that, having created a 
world where the steps of unfolding carry with them imperfec- 
tion and suffering and mistake, God sits elate in the centreof the 
heavens and keeps company with the universe which He 
creates ; and as mankind suffer God suffers for them and with 
them, as it has been expressed in Scripture : " the Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world." My thought of God is 
not that of a rigorous magistrate bound by law and by precept 
to execute punishment on the undeserving, and favour on all 
them that have merited it. I have a God that is the God of 
the infirm, of the contemptible, of those that are biassed. I 
have a High Priest that can be selected according to the old 
Jewish idea, that was selected that He might have compassion 
upon the ignorant and those that are out of the way, out of 
law, out of public sentiment. That, as the letters of the Apostle 
show, was the idea as to Jesus Christ, who was a sufferer for 
love's sake, who stood in His own simple person as One let 
down from heavenly intelligences, who came from the bosom 
of the Father. 

I do not use the arguments to prove the Divinity of Christ 
that have been so favoured. I believe that Christ was God. 
I do not understand the Trinity, although I accept it as one of 
the great mysteries insoluble in this state of being ; I accept it 
very heartily. When I am asked, " Do you believe that Christ 
was God ? ' ? I reply, I do certainly ; I could not get along 
without it ; I could not live without that thought. If He was 
a messenger of God that would be a great deal to me ; but a 
messenger is not enough. But if Christ came into the world 
and said " I am the Son of the Father," if He taught me that 
He was for all substantial purposes Divine, so that I might 
love Him supremely, worship Him, give my whole life to Him, 
why, that is Divinity enough for me. I cannot pierce the veil 
and analyse the Infinite ; I cannot bring things to an arith- 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 187 

metical basis, nor anything of that kind ; but this I can do — I 
can say I believe that Jesus Christ was God in such a sense as 
that He brought within the bounds of finity the Infinite as 
far as it could be incorporated in matter, and that He did 
come to make a literal representation of the Divine disposition, 
and that above every other thing He came down to say : 
" What you see Me to be, meek, gentle, humble, merciful, 
long-suffering, patient, self-sacrificing, loving My enemies and 
My destroyers — I am that because that is God ; He does the 
same ; He does so because it is the nature of God, and I came 
on earth to represent these things, not as a perfect man, but 
as the representation of the disposition of the Divine, eternal 
God." Now when I look upon Christ in that light, oh ! how 
the flight of thoughts, like dove-flights, go up, and I see how 
patient He was to the sick, how patient He was to the sinful, 
how the harlot herself found mercy at His feet, how wicked 
men flocked round Him, and I hear Him saying : " They 
that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick; " 
He represents that to be the staple of His character, and then 
He says : " I am the representative ; I and My Father are 
one.'' Now I have got a conception of the regent-God of the 
universe that not only lifts my ideas above the horizons of 
time, but throws a light upon the mystery of the unfolding of 
the human family upon this earth, and of the suffering going 
on on every hand that otherwise no philosophy can solve. Tell 
me not that I can learn the ways of God to man — I shall not 
learn them till I am with Him — but only tell me that in this 
march of time " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
pain until to-day " • tell me not that my God is a statue of 
Justice, a marble-hearted God, sitting in His temple, and not 
caring what the weepers did below because they deserved to 
weep. I am banished, I am killed, I am dead, I cannot bear 
the thought of such a God as that. But tell me that in the 
mystery of creation and in all the great throes of time God is 
with us all, and always has been with the poor and needy and 
wicked in all creation, that He has loved them, and is by the 
mighty power of His love lifting them up — now I begin to 
have a conception of a crowned God that puts to shame the 
Pagan notions of God and the Pagan-Christian notion. God 
can suffer. I cannot worship a God that cannot suffer. It is 
not the suffering of ignominy nor of physical pain, nor of the 
violation of law, but of sympathy. Love in its nature suffers. 



1 88 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

If I want a gauge of friendship it is how much some one will 
suffer for me that measures the strength of his love ; it is not 
how much a lover will give me, but how much he will bear for 
me, how much he will suffer for me — the mother everything, 
the father much, friends a little, neighbours none. 

What, then, is the meaning of this great act of Christ 
coming on earth and suffering ? He passed through in the 
career of His earthly existence almost every avenue of humble 
origin, of neglect, of hard-bearing industries, of all forms of 
supercilious contempt on the part of the educated of His own 
people. He came into the ministry by the back door ; He 
never had the favour of the synagogue or of the officials ; He 
was never regularly ordained into the priesthood or ministry at 
all. In everything He took the under side ; He was every- 
where weak and in want, and He went through life a Man of 
Grief, acquainted with it in all its phases. He was seized 
unjustly, ignominiously executed, held up to the scorn of the 
ages, and returned into heaven, suffering, suffering, sufferings 
to tell mankind that God had cared for men, that God was 
willing to share the burdens that had been imposed upon 
mankind, and that we have a Redeemer whose sufferings 
and death were a revelation of the eternal nature of our 
God. 

Oh ! for such a thought as that I would fain die if it were for 
the first time born within me. And this is the God that I love 
to preach ; this is the God the preaching of whom in the ful- 
ness and glory of this power of suffering will make revolu- 
tionary work among the dry bones of the old mediaeval 
philosophies. It is a living God, a loving God ; and the love 
of God is a love that knows how to suffer. The idea is not 
that of a God who sits complacently to hear Himself praised,, 
praised, praised. It is more like the idea of the father and 
mother when grey hairs have streaked their brow, and their 
children come home at Thanksgiving or at Christmas, and in 
the merry happy light of heaven there sit six or eight children 
frolicking about, and loving and kissing each other, mingling 
their senses of gratitude and love for the fidelity of their parents 
to them. There is no flattery, there is nothing demoralising 
in that ; it is glorious. My God is not one that looks out upon 
the universe with the short, hasty eye of time ; he dwells in 
eternity. God has time enough for anything and everything. 
The revolving ages that seem to us endless in the past and 



Paul's Idea of the Cross. 189 

endless in the future are as yesterday to God. He is a fast 
workman ; and I believe that when we shall come and appear 
in Zion the whole mighty problem of time will roll out, and, in 
a perfect diapason of grandeur and love and joy, mankind will 
sing : " God is love, and time benevolence." We are walking 
through dark ways ; we are in the age of suffering ; we are pro- 
tected by what we suffer ; but suffering is not necessarily a 
badge of degradation. Sympathetic suffering marks a high 
degree of love, and God is high over all others. 

This is the Jesus I present to you. He has been everything 
to me. I have no hope outside of Him. I have no thought 
for life sweeter than that He loves me and is with me. I have 
gone through many troublous times, I have borne many hard 
burdens, I have known both poverty and abundance ; but 
whether in good or evil, in darkness or in light, the conscious- 
ness that Christ was with me, that He loved me more than I 
loved myself, that whatever was laid upon me was with His 
knowledge and permission, has given me strength in the wilder- 
ness, in perils among false brethren and perils of every kind. 
In sickness and health, in reproach and in approbation, Christ 
loves me, has been the one inspiration of hope and of joy. It 
is the hope I have for men, for the crooked, for those that are 
out of the way, for the ignorant. "We have a High Priest that 
can be touched with a feeling of our infirmities," that has been 
" tempted in all points " as we are, only He has not sinned. 
And here is what He says : " Naked and open are we before 
Him with whom we have to do." He " discerns between the 
spirit, joint, and marrow " ; He is " sharper than a two-edged 
sword " ; we are like an open book before Him. He knows us 
altogether. The natural inference of fear would be : " Oh, hide 
me from His face, if He knows everything — all my secret 
thoughts ! " No, no ! With the sweet smile and all the bland- 
ishments of love He says : " Open are you ; come boldly to the 
throne of grace to obtain mercy and help in time of need." 
Jesus sits like the open summer to those that are in the Arctic 
regions and says : " Come down into the beauty and plenitude 
of My nature." This is the Saviour that I preach for sinners ; 
this is the hope of salvation. You can repent, Christ helping 
you ; you can give up your old sins, Christ inspiring you. 
You say the law is against you, that classes are against 
you. God is for you ; and if God be with us, who can be 
against us? Our help is in the heavens. The sovereign 



190 Paul's Idea of the Cross. 

Source of all power in the universe is your personal Friend. 
It is He that calls this morning : " Come unto Me all ye 
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'' 
In Jesus there is rest; in the world none. And as Paul 
gloried in the revelation to him of the power of God to 
suffer by sympathy with mankind, and as Jesus Christ repre- 
sents to us that all those beautiful scenes which we hang over 
in His history on earth are but mere specimens of the grander 
scenes that are taking place on an infinite scale in the eternal 
world — oh! can we not to-day say: " I accept this Christ 
— this is my God, this is my hope, and this is my salvation " ? 



NEEDLESS CARE AND ANXIETY. 



" Casting all your care upon Him for He careth for you." — I Peter v. 7. 

THERE are very many humble virtues, as men call them;, 
that have more to do with daily life than the loftier aspi- 
rations and experiences of men. It is a good thing to cul- 
tivate noble ideals, but realities are the germs of idealities ; 
and while there is abundant reason to believe that men are to 
live as seeing Him who is invisible, there is an equally abun- 
dant evidence to show that we are to live mainly in this world, 
and that religious experience does not consist chiefly in vene- 
ration and in enthusiastic experience of joy and love, but that 
it consists in the hourly and momently states of our own mind, 
in the dispositions which we have. In other words, it is a 
good thing to make it sure that we shall live hereafter ; but it 
is also a good thing to know how to live here and now. It 
seems to me that this is simply the practise ground, and that 
we are to live hereafter, and to know that we are, by practising 
those virtues which will make it possible for us to understand 
anything in heaven — its company, its joys, its associations. 

I am going to speak to you this morning on the subject of 
needless care and anxiety. If there is anybody here that is not 
guilty, he will be kind enough to lift up his hand and let us 
see who it is that casts all his care on the Lord, or fulfils the 
other injunction, " I would have you without carefulness." If 
there is anybody that lives here in a spirit of quiet and equable 
joy, mind-tranquillity, then life has written a false line on your 
faces. I sometimes stand at the door in the city and watch 
the people going by with wonder — there are so few people 
happy, or, if they be happy, there are no signs of it visible on 
their countenances. I make some exception to this in the 



192 Needless Care and Anxiety. 

■case of little children. Asa general thing, children are happy, 
cheerful, merry, thoughtless of to-morrow. " Except ye be 
•converted and become as little children," the Master says. 
In other words, He looked at childhood, restfulness and trust- 
fulness, as something that men outwore ; and it would be a 
blessed thing if they could get back to that tranquil state. 
When I look at the structure of the mind I see that God has 
made it for happiness. Jt is true that the capacity of being 
unhappy increases with the capacity of being happy. In that 
regard we differ from the animal kingdom. It has sometimes 
been a question whether the world was created for pleasure or 
for malice. If you judge by a survey of the conditions of 
happiness, high and low, widespread, I think you will say that 
the God that made this world means happiness, just as much 
as the man that builds an organ means music ; but then if in 
the bombardment of a city a ball has gone smashing through 
the organ, and you then undertook to play it, you might come 
to the conclusion that some philosophers have arrived at — that 
the organ was made for discord. How hideous it sounds ! It 
was built for harmony and beauty of sound, and something 
has happened, or it would still give forth that for which it was 
built. I know that there are many puzzling questions in 
regard to this. They once puzzled me, but they have lost 
their power. I see that Nature creates unbounded multitudes 
of things, and that other things are created to eat them up. I 
see that insects and birds, and many of the feebler animals 
are so made as that a large and higher class in creation feed 
on them. In other words, destructiveness is the law of 
Nature ; it is the very condition of existence on the part of 
strong things. The spider eats flies : the sparrow eats the 
spider ; the hawk eats the sparrow ; and man eats everything, 
high and low. Destructiveness seems to have been incorpo- 
rated into the very necessity of living in this world ; and when 
you apply this with the light thrown upon destructiveness as it 
exists between human beings, it produces a false interpretation 
in regard to design and happiness in the whole world. 
Because every single second that an insect lives is clear gain. 
If it had not lived it would have been nothing. If it lived but 
an hour it had that hour. And in all the inferior kingdom, 
death is painless, and not only painless — it is without fore- 
sight, without anxiety ; and life is simply a gift of so much 
golden atmospheric joy. You might as well say that all the 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 193 

creatures that are not created are evidence of a malign design 
as to complain that some are created with different ranks and 
shorter periods and lower tones of pleasure. All the way up 
to man there is no anxiety. It is anxiety that scours out the 
metal. It is to-morrow that is all that I am sitting in judgment 
on to-day. It is, to be sure, also the fountain of hope and 
•expectation, but it is the foresight, likewise, of disappointment 
and of sorrow ; and taking life all the way through society, 
the lower, middle, and upper classes, I think it may be said 
that more than one-half of the possible enjoyment of life is 
dredged out of men by foresight. To be sure, foresight is a 
great blessing if you know how to use it. If you have a steed, 
and you just touch him with the spur, it is good for him ; but 
if you rowel him every minute you drive him distracted. So 
in life it is good for a man to have the power of foreseeing and 
providing against contingent or possible dangers ; but where a 
man uses this capacity of forelooking to bring imaginary terrors 
to him, imaginary failures, failures that take on different degrees 
of light or dark according to the condition of a man's liver or his 
stomach, or according to his exhaustions, it is very doubtful 
whether the power of foresight is not worse than any gift 
that a man has. I have this impression, that we waste more 
than half of the allotted possible satisfactions of life by care 
and by anxiety ; and it is against that wasteful, that rebellious 
spirit that our Master speaks so abundantly in the earlier 
chapters — the fifth, sixth, and seventh — of Matthew. 

Now, when I look into a man I see that he is so organised 
that he has drastic animal powers and passions which bring so 
much of our suffering to us. They are, or should be, under 
the control of the spiritual faculties. In other words, if there 
are animal qualities, lusts and appetites, if there are these lower 
forces in the minds of men, then, again, there is hopefulness, 
there is imagination, there is benevolence, there is mirthful- 
ness, there is humour, and all these qualities have levity, 
and they tend to create an atmosphere round about a man 
which overrules and controls these lower appetites and passions 
to a degree. It is a very great mistake, that the ascetics have 
made, and that, to a certain degree, our Puritan ancestors have 
made and that is made to-day by those that are supreme 
teachers of religion, that religion manifests itself by sobriety. 
Yes, if drunkenness is what is meant by being unsober, it 
does ; but when the apostles speak of sobriety, they mean 



194 Needless Care and Anxiety. 

sobriety of disposition and thought, not sobriety of animal 
drinking. We are to be sober. Now, sobriety does not mean 
unsmilingness. A man can be just as sober when he smiles as 
when he does not. It is supposed that integrity and trust- 
worthiness go with a certain gravity of countenance. If a 
man's face is cast in a mould of gravity, he cannot help him- 
self; but if a man has a face that is competent to smile and 
be cheerful, and does not use it in that way, he violates the 
spirit of the Gospel itself; for the Old Testament and the 
New, everywhere, in their higher and purer forms, represent 
peace and joyfulness and trustfulness. But there came creep- 
ing in through the mediaeval ascetic heresy the idea that he 
who is the most sad and sorrowful, and slavishly prostrate 
before God comes nearer touching God's heart than anybody 
else. Which of the children would touch your heart ? Would 
it be those that stood at the door, and eyed you, and waited to 
see that you were in a happier mood, and then stealthily crept 
towards you, getting more and more prone till they got down 
before your feet ? Would you not be inclined to kick them 
away and say : " You are no children of mine ; I want you to 
come with the freedom of love to me or not come at all " ? 
Yet men seem to think that the way to God is not that of 
hallelujahs, and chants, and joy, and radiance of spirit, but on 
your belly crawling before God ; and that if you can get under 
a roof that is all dark, with the windows painted dark, and 
with solemn services that groan themselves out of the organ 
and the choir, that is religion. You might just as well say that 
midnight was daylight. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of 
gladness, " Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest." Paul had two "things to say 
to the brethren — " Rejoice," and then he thought again, and 
said : " Well, again I say rejoice," as if there were only one 
thing to say anyhow. But the old hierarch and ascetic, long- 
faced, says : " Gloom, groan, sigh, confess your sins." Of 
course you confess your sins ; but that is the door through which 
a man comes to light and joy, and there can be nothing to be 
more impressed upon the minds of the young and those that 
do not believe in religion than this — that the New Testament 
as well as the Old Testament conception of religion was son- 
ship, and the mode of approach trust, love, and joyfulness. 
I do not say that men of a severe countenance and men that 
ask forgiveness if they smile are not good men ; they cannot 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 195 

help themselves — they have had bad theology to teach them, 
and it may be that they have a disposition that is arid, not 
fruitful in imagination, in joyfulness. But this I do say, that 
when they set themselves up, or are set up by other people, 
to represent what true religion is in a man, they are condemn- 
able, they bear false witness, for I say to you that the truest 
spirit of religion, according to the declarations of the New 
Testament, brings light and peace and gladness, not only as 
towards God, but as towards one another. 

The Bible certainly does not neglect the duties of reve- 
rence, of worship, of benevolence ; but it takes care of every- 
day moods, of the things that make this life easy and beautiful 
as well as of those that secure the other life. Here was the 
root and the stumbling point of the ascetic doctrine — namely 
that in Adam's fall everybody was cursed throughout the 
world, that natural laws were cursed, that man was cursed 
body and soul, and made incompetent to any good. It is the 
devil's own gospel that. The true rendering of that most 
cheerful, joyous, sparkling book that ever was written, is this ; 
"Rejoice and be glad,'' just as it was in the Psalms and in 
many of the rapturous passages of the Old Testament; and 
gladness, peacefulness, restfulness, and trustfulness are the 
signs and tokens of true religion. These our children should 
be taught, and we should teach them by the effect of religion 
upon our own dispositions and our own lives. 

This contentment — that is, absence from care — is founded 
partly on a wise preservation of health, partly upon a wise 
education of your minds, partly on a conscious trust in an 
ever-present God, who loves you and will take care of you — 
that mainly and chiefly. If trust in God and His providence 
be not taught by the Gospel of St. Matthew, if our Saviour's 
Sermon on the Mount does not plough and subsoil all these 
ungodly anxieties and forecastings, then I do not know what 
language can be made to mean. Repentance and reforma- 
tion, growth in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, are more emphatically taught by a quiet 
mind than they are by a mind that is drooping and dragging 
and melancholy. 

The roads which lead to anxiety may properly attract our 
attention for a few moments. In the first place there is that 
kind of living which exhausts the vitality of the body. Men 
spend their capital, and they break down with liver complaint ; 



196 Needless Care and Anxiety. 

they spend their capital, and break down with dyspepsia : they 
spend their capital, and vices have drained them dry long 
before they should have been blighted. Anything that takes 
out of the nervous system its vital tone lowers a man's con- 
scious enjoyment ; and if, therefore, men are melancholy, sad- 
minded, and see nothing hopeful or healthful when they are 
sick, they ought to be treated like sick men. But a man would 
never want to see the benefits of health by going into a hos- 
pital and seeing the woes of sickness ; and in life we are not to 
go to men that are desponding, and dull-eyed, and complaining, 
never having any luck. There are thousands of men that 
never did have luck but once in their lives, and that was when 
they died. Such men oftentimes throw a gloom over the 
whole landscape, and over the whole experience. This is all 
bad, all bad ! 

But, aside from this, the melancholy that comes from 
exhausted nervous forces— the invalid's melancholy, which is a 
matter for medication just as much as any organic lesion — 
there are great differences arising from national character. 
Nations that value time, that are inspired with endless industry, 
that are taxing in various ways every resource — the weaker 
among them, and those that fail, naturally fall into a kind of 
gulf of despondency ; they are more likely to be attacked with it 
than any other. I am speaking about your nation, I am speaking 
about my own — I am speaking of the Anglo-Saxon race. We 
are a driving, accomplishing, enterprising, industrious people, 
and we are very apt to waste our forces without moderation, 
and to determine our enjoyment by the amount of ambitions 
which have been fulfilled in our strife with Nature and with 
society. I do not think that in the Oriental lands, where men 
do not try to excel and do not excel, there is half so much mis- 
enjoyment as there is in the nations that have aspiration and 
ambition. It is a national temptation. 

Then, besides that, modern civilisation is so complex, and so 
exciting, and so nerve-consuming, that that tends to mislead 
men and draw them away from the true spirit of religion. I 
would not on that account untwist the cords that go to make 
the strong bonds of civilisation. A man lives in our time in a 
civilised community, and in the full enjoyment of all the 
things which knowledge and refinement and religion bring. A 
man lives more in one year than a savage life affords in eighty 
years. We live more in one hour than the majority of the globe 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 197 

live in twenty-four. And thus, as there is so much excitement, 
and such a play of the mind perpetually, and so many things 
in civilisation that are neither wise nor wholesale, by the very 
mercies of civilisation we are in danger of bringing ourselves 
into the shallow waters, and coming into that state in which we 
are anxious and full of cares as to what will happen to-morrow 
and what will happen next week. In business it is largely so. 
It is largely so in that part of business in which men commit 
themselves to trust, to credit. The man that pays as he goes, 
and that at every day at sundown knows just how he stands, 
must be a very sad-minded man if he does not find it 
easier to be trustful and calm than the man that is trusting 
everything to contingencies in the future. So, then, our very 
style of civilisation tends to lead us into false conditions of 
mind. 

Then there is this greed of wealth, I think, perhaps, almost 
more than anything else, and it is that that Christ struck be- 
tween the very two eyes when He said to His disciples : 
" Take no thought for the morrow ; the morrow shall take 
thought for itself : the Gentiles seek what they shall eat and 
what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be 
clothed ; be ye not like them ; trust your heavenly Father, who 
knows that you have need of all these things." You can push 
that to an extreme in which it would be false ; but as an over- 
ruling idea of living within the scope of an easy hopefulness 
there can be no question what Christ meant in that matter. 
When men have enough for to-day and measurably for months 
— raiment enough, food enough, shelter enough, prospect 
enough — they are not likely to be tempted with carefulness of 
this sordid kind ; but where a man wants not only enough for 
himself and his wife and children and household, but more 
than he has any need of, when a man wants enough and a 
surplus, and then wants enough and a double surplus, and 
then enough and a quadruple surplus, he begins to have the 
ambition of wealth ; he wants more than that man who has got 
who used to hold his head so high, and he says, " I will show 
him some day ; : ' he wants more than his father had, more than 
that old banker or capitalist had. He has just found out the 
way to get rich ; it is not because his children need it, it is not 
because he needs it, but because he thinks he can get it, and 
then he will have the credit of it and the power of it, and can 
parade himself among admiring crowds, who will whisper : 



198 Needless Care and Anxiety. 

" See there the richest man in town." And so it comes to 
pass that that which, in a moderate degree, is a virtue and a 
benefit to the individual and to society, multiplying the means 
of civilisation which we can yield for ourselves and for others, 
leads us to become the slaves of avarice and greediness ; and 
where this comes to pass see what strife, what collision, what 
rivalry, what envy, what morbid solicitudes ! So men are dis- 
turbed by their enterprise. 

Then society itself is a great bundle of legislation. After 
all the laws of Nature have been laid down, and the laws of 
civil society have been introduced, then the great mass of man- 
kind introduce another and more subtle set of laws of etiquette 
and procedure, never written and not writeable, but neverthe- 
less learned, and by-and-by the question comes to be : " What 
will people think of us ? What must we do at table ? What 
must we do in the carriage ? What must we do in the side- 
walk ? How must we dress ? What is the public sentiment, 
and how can we defer to it ? " All these ten thousand nebu- 
lous questions harass some foolish people's lives, and render 
them full of care and perpetual anxiety. Simplicity dies in 
the presence of fashion. 

But besides these there are the tendencies which are bred 
by poverty that is never so poor as in the presence of wealth ; 
and never so poor as in the case of men that have had wealth 
and have broken down and sunk little by little to the bottom 
of society, and lost self-respect and reputation and everything, 
and that look even upon their family and their children with- 
out any remuneration of joy. " Once," they say, " I could 
have brought up my children like anybody else — now I can- 
not ; I can do nothing for them ; my life is ended ; I have got 
no property, no reputation." Good heavens ! Haven't you 
got a God left ? Haven't you immortality left ? Have you 
not all the realm of peace which God ministers to the soul of 
a man ? Get up out of the dungeon of your passions ; get up 
where the sunshine comes ! A man has stumbled on the road 
of life, and has lost his house. Well, it is hard to see the 
piano go out and be sold by auction ; it is hard to pull off the 
diamond rings and sell them to raise a little money ; it is 
harder yet to see a person whose spirit is cowed because he 
has to get rid of the superfluities of life ; it is harder yet to 
see a man that has so little conception of what he is in Godt 
I am a son of God. Roll my garments in the dust — what 



Needless Care a7id Anxiety. 199 

then ? Roll my crown from the head — nobody can take away 
my crown; it "remaineth " ; there is a peace of God that re- 
maineth. There is no rivalry for your faith, none for your 
hope, none for your joy, the endless treasury of a son of God, 
who, because he is an heir of God and joint heir with Jesus 
Christ, owns the universe. The idea of man knuckling down 
to disappointments and troubles that has all this left to him 
shows that the man is broken not only outside, but inside, 
shattered to atoms. Your life is not here, it is hid with Christ 
in God ; and every man ought to feel in himself : " I am that 
that no man can smirch ; no matter what reprobate lips may 
say, it cannot touch me." The eagle sits upon the topmost 
crag, and -the fowler far below draws vain arrows at him. 
There is not power in the bow to send the shaft so high as 
where he sits securely. And he who has made God his trust 
need fear neither bullet nor arrow, for no man can reach to 
touch him with harm there. In that hope ought we to live ; 
we are the sons of God. 

Hopefulness, cheerfulness — these are the tests of trustful- 
ness; and the question comes up from you: "Can we get 
these things if we do not have them by nature ? " And here 
let me say it is more easy for some men to be trustful than 
others. So it is easier for some men to run fast than it is for 
others. But do not the slow-paced run? Some men are 
taller than others ; but what has that to do with life ? Some 
men think faster than others ; some men have a good deal 
more feeling than others ; some men are arithmeticians and 
mathematicians by birth, and some are not ; some men can 
paint, others cannot ; some men can write poetry — thank God 
all cannot do it ! There are, of course, variations of attain- 
ment following variations of constitution, education, natural 
forces. Some men are by nature hopeful. Now and then I 
see a man so constitutionally hopeful that, come weal, come 
woe, he is always bright and cheerful ; there are other men so 
constitutionally dull that they make me think of a waggon 
whose body is set down on the axles, with no springs at all 
under it ; every stone and pebble jolts it on the road ; and so 
these men get on through life. Yes, there is a good deal of 
difference between one man and another. That is no reason 
why, in a school, each child shall not make attainments 
according to his Jtalents. Everybody can work towards cheer- 
fulness and happiness and sweet content in the Christian life. 



2co Needless Care and Anxiety. 

Some will do it as leaders, some mid-way, some as laggards, 
but all can do a good deal in that direction ; therefore it 
becomes the duty of men to study it. You certainly cannot 
do it by excusing yourself. I have heard men say to me : 
" Yes, Mr. Beecher, it is very easy for you that are in pros- 
perity and in popular conditions to stand up there in the pul- 
pit, with your salary, with all your loving friends around you, 
to talk to us about patience. Just come down where we are* 
and take the buffeting life as we do, and you would see." 
Then thank God that there is somebody that stands so much 
higher than care that he can tell you what you ought to feeL 
But don't be in a hurry. I have had my share of trouble in 
this life, and, thank God ! I have had my emancipation out of 
the very doctrine that I am preaching to you to-day. If I 
were to groan and grumble as some men do over trials that 
have pursued me, sometimes like a hurricane, the bereave- 
ments and sorrows and various trials of my life, I should be 
like a fountain of complaints all the time. But I learned 
early to love Jesus. I learned early to take that peace which 
passeth all understanding from Him. He has never forsaken 
me ; and I have carried this thought with me at every step 
through my long, and laborious, and varied life ; and I bear 
witness to you that, though I have courage and hopefulness 
naturally, I should have been crushed long ago if I had not 
had it. I know that I am dear to God ; I know that He 
would not have put these troubles upon me if He did not mean 
to sustain me. I have said in many and many a dark hour to the 
Lord : " Lay on ; I believe You would not put on more than 
I can bear, and I will bear whatever You put on." What 
earthly parent would not think of his child's capacity ? And 
is there an earthly parent that is half so tender to his children 
as my Lord is to me ? And if I can carry an atmosphere full 
of God round about me, I say to the storms : "Come on; " 
to darkness: "Gloom;" to sickness itself: "Shake your 
poisoned dagger; " yea, and to death : " Glory be to God that 
death, on this side so full of darkness, on the other instantly 
is full of glory, and light, and joy unspeakable." So, then, 
while some men have a constitutional tendency towards hope, 
and patience, and courage, it is a part of the constitution of 
every man which he can cultivate. Do not, therefore, excuse 
yourselves. 

Brethren, how do you live in your families ? Old men, you 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 201 

ought to be like autumn, like October in the year. It is not 
June, young and smiling, that is most beautiful, tender as it 
is ; it is not wealth-producing July and August ; it is not 
September even ; it is October, when all the trees put on their 
beautiful garments as if they were going to the Lord's wed- 
ding, to death itself. The man that has gone through life, 
fought his battles, and accepted the results, and is nearing his 
heavenly home is conscious of his riches in the future and in 
his God ; and the old, of all the men in the world, ought to be 
ashamed to sit with a haggard face, and in a moping way to 
say to the children : " Ah ! you will find that the world is not 
such a world as you think it is now ; it is a sad world, my 
dear ! " You lie ! It is a glorious world ; and old age ought 
to be ashamed to mope heresy in the ears of the young. It is 
a world for strength ; it is a world for enterprise ; it is a world 
for achievement ; it is a world where a man can prove himself 
a good soldier. When you shall see an old veteran of the 
wars who has fought a hundred battles sitting rheumatic and 
crooning up in the corner, disdaining his campaigns, refusing 
to tell the children of his hairbreadth escapes, then you may 
find an example that old men may perhaps be allowed to 
follow. An old man should say to his child: "Be brave." 
An old man should say to every one about him : "I have 
fought a good fight, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is 
laid up for me a crown of glory which Christ, the righteous 
Judge, shall give." 

And more than that : we have everywhere throughout the 
Bible exhortations to this spirit of hopefulness and cheerful- 
ness, which show that it is a main consideration in the training 
of the Church of Christ. "Let your conversation,'' says 
Peter, "be without covetousness, and be content with such 
things as ye have, for He hath said, I will never leave thee 
nor forsake thee, so that I may boldly say, I will not fear what 
man shall do unto me." What encouragement that is in the 
trials of life ! " Come unto Me," is that wonderful voice of 
God, " all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest." " Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for My 
yoke is easy and My burden is light ; and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls." Does religion mean joy and peace, or does 
it not ? Does it mean anxiety, moping, melancholy testi- 
monies ? It has always seemed to me that while the Hebrews 
were not a mirthful people, and while there is nothing in our 



202 Needless Care and Anxiety. 

Lord's teaching that indicates humour or mirth, there is one 
passage that comes so near to it that I think it must uncon 
sciously have been so. In those very passages in which He 
was disdaining the anxieties of men, he says : ■'■ Which of you 
by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature ? " Here 
is a man only five feet high ; he cannot draft into the army ; 
every one looks down on him ; he is sad about it, and he goes 
about saying: "Oh, if I were only a few inches taller?" 
Christ says: "What is that? Wishing you were taller won't 
make you taller." Which of you by taking anxious thought 
can add a cubit to his stature ? Which of you, by all your 
anxieties, can make to-morrow any smoother than it would 
have been without them ? Which of you by your groaning 
and grumbling can change the future ? It changes you, it 
rasps you, it wears you out, it puts bitterness in your sweetened 
cup. I tell you, the spirit of trust, hope, and joy in the Lord 
Jesus is the most victorious atmosphere in which a man can 
work out his temporal or eternal salvation. Joy in the Lord 
is healthy, it is happy, it is normal, whether by natural or 
Divine appointment. 

And that is not all. There are reasons for cultivating this 
spirit. It will make you happier. Your own happiness will be 
wonderfully promoted. But, what is more to the point, you 
will make those round about you happy. There are two ways 
of living. One way says to the people round about : " Come 
and make me happy ; " and the other way says: "Come and 
let me make you happy." And that brings you on to the 
declaration which might have been left out of the Bible if 
Paul had not happened to think of it and bring it in : 
u Remember the words of the Lord, how He said, it is 
more blessed to give than to receive." If your circumstances 
are making you very unhappy, try to make somebody else 
happy, and you will find what light will arise upon you. Do 
not live for your eternal self; live for others, as God does, 
and He will breathe something of His spirit of happiness on 
you. 

And that is not all. It will be one of the testimonies to the 
reality of religion which can not be made in any other way so 
easily and so effectually. A chemist sits down with his class 
and says to them : " Darkness is the subject on which I shall 
discourse. Darkness is nothing ; it is the mere absence or 
light ; " and so he gives a chemical and philosophical statement 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 203 

of the fact that all darkness dies the moment light comes into 
the room. Now a cheaper way would have been simply to 
light a candle — that would settle the whole thing. Men are 
teaching religion, not living it. Men are teaching botany out 
of books ; why don't you plant plants in the garden and let 
the children go and see what they are ? Men are teaching you 
that you need to be born again. Well, you don't need to be 
taught that. I find that out every time I run against anybody. 
I found it out myself first. The power of the spirit of God to 
regenerate a man : you can prove it by the Bible, you can 
prove it by a hundred thousand sermons in church, you can 
prove Christianity historically and theologically and scientific- 
ally, but one single living Christian is worth more than the 
whole thing put together. The church in many and many a 
town does not shed so much light of conviction on the minds 
of men as one sweet, patient, gentle woman in poverty, the 
richest of all that dwell in the place. I have known in my 
long ministry that the marrow of my church lay among the 
poor, the broken-down in this life. I recall to-day Mother 
Rice, the wife of a drunken sea-captain, who had drifted far 
away from Maine into Indiana, living over a cooper's shop, the 
floor of her chamber wood logs, with interspaces such that she 
was likely to drop her plates and knives into the shop below. 
There she stood, with a sweetness and cheerfulness that I then 
had never seen or dreamed of. Wherever there was a creature 
that was poor, Mother Rice was there ; wherever any one was 
sick, Mother Rice was there ; wherever anybody had come to 
death, Mother Rice was comforting those who remained. 
Everywhere where cheer and contentment and patience and 
sweetness were required, there was Mother Rice j and I have 
confounded many infidels when they were telling me that they 
did not believe in these parsons that preached for money by 
asking: " Do you believe in Mother Rice?" "Ah! that is 
another thing," they said. One person that exemplifies Christ 
in human form is the gospel for that neighbourhood, and there 
are ten thousand heretics in every neighbourhood that are 
teaching for gospel by their bad lives things that ought not to 
be taught. " Let your works so shine that men, seeing them, 
shall glorify your Father which is in heaven." How many 
folks have glorified God because they saw that you lived so 
beautifully? That is something for you to take home with 
you. 



204 Needless Care and Anxiety, 

I could, of course, descant with endless variations and 
applications upon this most important subject. Every house 
ought to be a church, and every person a preacher, and the 
sermon should be that part of the gospel that has been dis- 
solved into your own life, and which in action, and conduct, 
and disposition will give to men a specimen of what you mean 
when you speak of religion, and this with a sweetness of love 
that never fails, with a charity that extenuates all faults except 
its own, with a cheerfulness that gives testimony that you are 
a child of light, and with a trust under all circumstances in 
life which leads men to believe that God is with you, and that 
you have the Almighty arm round about you. This is that 
which every man should preach ; and every man should preach 
who is himself called of God, and who has hope, through 
Jesus Christ, of immortality and of glory. Oh ! when that 
day comes when there shall be one single family in a village 
that is full of the fragrance and brightness of a true Christian 
disposition — when that day shall come that any church has six 
or eight families of that kind of whom the pastor can say : " Ye 
are our epistles, known and read of all men ; " nay, when there 
shall be in town or village a score of different denominations, 
not scuffling, and envying, and quarrelling, and criticising each 
other, but all filled with men that exemplify the spirit of love, 
and all helping each other — why, there will come such a pen- 
tecostal whirlwind as shall put an end to all doubt as to the 
final triumph of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The world is 
never going to be converted by books, nor by missionary 
societies, nor by missionaries, but by the great body of Christian 
men that live so high, so pure, so sweet, so noble as that 
heaven shall have seemed to come down on earth, and men 
shall not want to disbelieve, and infidelity will die because men 
cannot but admire true religion. To that great work and this 
great millennial future, brethren, let us all address ourselves. 
And that you may do it, begin with your own soul, and work 
within it, that you may be prepared to work within other souls ; 
and so, by that of Jesus which you are living, grow in grace? 
and in the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 



HEROISM IN SUFFERING. 



"Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father 
of mercies, and the God of all comfort ; who comforteth us in all our 
tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble 
by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the 
sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by 
Christ."— 2 Cor. i. 3—5. 

THERE is a joy that rises higher than any suffering ; there 
is a happiness that can have an under-tone of sorrow 
and an upper tone of ecstasy ; and while there is a great variety 
of enjoyments — the scale is long — no man has touched the 
ecstasy of happiness who has not been able to find it while 
under great sorrows and crushing griefs. No man ever made 
wine until he had crushed the cluster, and the heart-wine never 
is distilled till after the affections have been crushed. Suffering 
is the universal law of God. Every step upward which a man 
takes of real attainment is hewn out of the rock. " Whom the 
Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He 
receiveth." If a man grows up without any suffering whatever, 
he has the most odious stigma put upon him : " If ye be with- 
out suffering ye are bastards." A man is by birthright an 
animal, but every step of life is a working up all the way from 
the purely animal and throughout higher conditions. The 
animal, solitary for the most part, thinks simply of itself, and 
yet there is no selfishness in an animal : there is no higher part 
of its nature that is denied. There can be no sin except there 
be a conflict between higher and lower, and that cannot exist 
in the herd or in the flock. But man, unfolding into a social 
creature, has no right to regard his own self alone ; he must be 
in concurrence with society ; and now comes in selfishness. 
Not that a man is forbidden to take care of himself, but he is 



206 Heroism in Suffering. 

forbidden to take care of himself at the expense or even the 
neglect of his companions. That is the selfishness — not the 
care for one's-self, but the want of care for others. 

Well, at every step going up men learn by self-denial. Their 
temptation to selfishness is perpetual, and their combats with 
selfishness are indispensable, and they are more or less painful 
according to the victory which accrues from them. The same 
law applies to intellect. No man learns by nature. Every 
man learns by hard study. As he learns the lower departments 
of life he does not find rest. Although the victory over labour 
is pleasant, yet step by step as men ascend they must pay for 
it by thought, they must pay for it by withdrawing from all con- 
tradictions or distractions. Scholarship is a ladder in which at 
every step exertion, more or less painful, and self-denial are to 
be found. And when you come to the moral elements, which 
are the highest of the soul's powers ; to faith, which is imagin- 
ation sanctified ; to a commerce with the invisible ; to the 
preference of qualities rather than of things ; here is opened 
a still larger and wider battle-field, and at every step up- 
ward, from stage to stage, the labour pains are renewed. 
Men are not born singing, but crying ; and as they are at 
birth the children of sorrow, so at every new birth, every 
step upward in social excellence, every step beyond that to- 
wards intellectual, and every step beyond that towards moral 
excellence, have more or less the emblem of mortality upon 
them, which is suffering. 

Now we must not confound pain and suffering. It is true 
that all pain is suffering, but all suffering is not pain in any 
strict sense of the term. The body feels pain ; it is the 
mind that suffers. All pain, therefore, of the body may be 
supposed to spring from the violation of the laws of the 
body ; but suffering has a much wider range than that. A 
man suffers from the violation of law, but the fulfilment of 
the law more eminently than anything else brings suffering 
to men. As long as the example of Christ is before us we 
ought not to be surprised that suffering is a badge of fidelity 
and obedience. The subjugation of the inclinations brings 
suffering; the subordination among our passions, that are 
quanelling all the time with each other for precedence, brings 
suffering ; all self-denial by which the inferior is made subject 
to the superior brings suffering in milder or severer types. 



Heroism in Suffering. 207 

But while every man owes his growth to successive births in 
himself, which births are with pain or suffering, so there is a 
higher type than this ; it is the suffering for others. Some men 
have supposed that God could not suffer because He was per- 
fect. I cannot conceive of any being as perfect who cannot 
suffer, not the suffering following transgression, not the suffer- 
ing that comes from sin, but the suffering that comes from 
sympathy. Can you conceive of a mother that cannot 
suffer ? What ! not when the little babe in her arms is help- 
less, and needs her body by day and by night, through weari- 
ness and at all hazards ? And shall a mother not suffer the 
waste of her strength and the very substance of her life ? 
And when the child is sick shall the mother be sweet and 
smiling as a chippering bird over the cradle of the dying 
child ? Or if the children are tempted unawares to swerve 
from the line of rectitude and fidelity and love, does not the 
mother suffer for them? And are not these the traits that 
make motherhood heroic ? Is there no suffering in friend- 
ship for our friends? Do we not bear their burdens? 
When they knuckle down under weakness are we not at 
once ready to substitute our strength ? Do you love a man ? 
I do not look at the emotion, I look at what you are willing to 
do for him ; that measures love ; pleasures do not measure 
love, suffering does. The father and the mother, through long 
years of the child's inexperience, are building him up all the 
while by their solicitude, by their care, by their painstaking. 
A child is wretched in this world that has nobody to take pains 
with him. Think of the phrase : it is taking pains on your- 
self for the child's sake ; as one holds that in the great 
redemption-scheme the Divine took pains on Himself for the 
deliverance, for the elevation, for the final glory of His crea- 
tures. W 7 hat a revelation this is of God as a Being that fills 
the universe ! not sitting, not lying supine, not instituting cer- 
tain great machineries, and then lying by while the engine 
operates, He Himself taking his ease. He is the heart and 
centre of the whole universe, and is lifting up men on His 
heart and carrying them in their weakness, planning for them, 
forbearing with them, solicitous of them, playing the universal 
father and the universal mother ; suffering for men, not once 
in Gethsemane, not again on Calvary — these were simply types, 
specimens of that which has been going on — "the Lamb 



208 Heroism in Suffering. 

that was slain from the foundation of the world " — 
the Being that is most burdened, and the Being that 
suffers solicitude — not degrading suffering, not weakening 
suffering, but love suffering that is full of gladness as well as 
suffering. For oftentimes it is the case that suffering is the 
sub-base of the organ underlying the grandeur of all the upper 
notes, and the beauty and the sweet tone of the instrument 
would be comparatively thin were there not that great under- 
tone all the way through. And so is it with the nature of 
God. 

And not only do men suffer through sympathy in this way — 
and this is the basis of education — but unconsciously they 
suffer in another way for each other. Men's mistakes are the 
next men's blessings. One man lost ; the next man won't go 
that road ; he sees that he is lost, and he takes another, and 
he escapes, and others follow him ; thus the sufferer opened 
a way by his suffering which saved scores, nations, ages from 
suffering. And so it is that there are men that are hopeful, 
and run forward in life with new inventions and discoveries, 
and waste and ruin themselves before men believe in them, 
and die; they are said to be schemers who, while they 
schemed, reaped their reward — (they did not in this life). 
So it comes to pass that men make mistakes in right ways 
and directions, and these, though they suffer, bless the race. 
The history of men that have developed art and beauty, 
even in the lower tiers of life, that have developed excel- 
lence, is a history of heroic suffering, often without sympathy 
from their fellow-men, or any recognition in this life. In 
the same way ages suffer ; one age suffers for the next. 
Civilisation is the generic accumulation of the trials, mistakes, 
ascertainments, and victories of the generations that have gone 
before. Look at any stable civil government to-day; how 
many thousands of men have shed their blood for it ! If 
there be anything dear to man to-day it is liberty of thought ; 
but how far back is that Egypt in which men, pressed down 
by superstition, and threatened by the finger of the law of 
the priesthood, had no liberty of thought? They were like 
the swine that eats what is poured into the trough for it. But 
to-day men are free to think, to explore, to sift knowledge, and 
to save the precious parts of it. Once men were padlocked 
when they thought, felt, realised ; they had no right to speak ; 



Heroism in Suffering. 209 

the universal priest was the universal man to speak, and men 
were not at liberty to declare what God was revealing to them 
in their own experience and moral consciousness. That at 
last has been triumphed over ; but what seas of blood the 
world went through before men had liberty of conscience and 
liberty of speech ! How have men aspired to liberty as 
citizens, and through what ages of barbarism has the world 
gone before coming to our relatively happy times, when 
men are free citizens, not simply obedient, but also bearing 
part, through public sentiment, in the ruling of the govern- 
ment ! So revolutions have brought on the world a certain 
way. The " garments rolled in blood " have been significant 
of the white garments and the white banner of peace, and the 
world, little by little, has emerged out of its lower states by 
sorrows, and by tears, and by strong crying, and by affliction, 
and by patient waiting and suffering, until we are the children 
that reap the harvests of blood. We are strong and wise and 
happy by reason of the weakness and the unwisdom and the 
tentative processes and all the sufferings of the whole human 
family that have gone before. For the world was at the first 
hardly better than so much soil ; but the soil began to develop 
life, and life itself in its circuits began to cast down the leaves of 
the trees, new soil, and advanced harvests ; and little by little 
the soil has grown deeper, and the harvests have grown richer 
and more abundant, and we are all of us living in our relative 
joys upon the sufferings of those that have reaped these joys 
and given us the seeds to re-sow them. 

But now it is time to remark that suffering is not the anti- 
thesis and antagonist of joy. Suffering and joy are not incom- 
patible ; they are co-operative. I had almost said that nobody 
knows what highest joy is that has not known deep suffering. 
This has been remarked in various ways by various observers. 
Spurzheim, the great phrenologist, said no woman was fit to be 
married until she had seen much suffering, which is a ripening 
and qualifying process. The persimmons in our own land are 
horribly acerb until they are frost-bitten, and then all their 
bitter and acid turns to sugar. So multitudes of men, so long 
as they are in the natural state, are bitter and unedible, but 
when trouble and sorrow come and freeze them they turn 
sweet and are worth something. I have been very poor in my 
lifetime, and I was not cast down. I had this feeling : " The 



2io Heroism in Suffering. 

less I have, and the more I can serve my Lord and Christ in 
my poverty, the happier I shall be. This life is not my home ; 
the other life is mine, and He is looking upon me ; and if I 
be heroic, and take suffering and sorrow for His cause, what 
triumph is mine ! '' And above all bodily wants and above all 
sense of shame or comparison of estate with other men's, I 
went through the wilderness; for I was a missionary in my 
earlier days in the unsettled and newly-settled portions of 
America, and I gloried in my poverty. My name was as 
nothing, my means were none. I expected to live and die in 
obscurity, and I gloried in it. For me to live was Christ, and 
to die gain. And I do know — oh, not as much as 1 should, 
not as I ought — but I know enough to declare that in the midst 
of sufferings and deprivation there may be rising out of the soul 
notes of exquisite music, peace that passeth all understanding, 
joy in the Holy Ghost. So then a man may, by his very 
sufferings, rejoice. In that wonderful necklace of pearls in 
the 5th of Matthew, where blessednesses come into life — 
" blessed are the poor," " blessed are the meek,"' — Christ 
blesses the things that all men despise and try to avoid as much 
as possible, but amongst the most astounding blessings is this, 
" Blessed are ye when men shall speak evil of you and revile 
you falsely for My sake, rejoice and be exceeding glad." Have 
you ever looked upon your struggles in that light ? Have you 
ever rejoiced most when your tears flowed ? Have you found 
treasure in your poverty ? Have you found your upper life 
fed by the depletion of your under life ? " Who, for the joy 
that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the 
shame, and is set down at the right hand of God." Here is 
the biographical experience of bur Saviour Jesus. 

Suffering, then, may be said to be education in benevolence. 
Let me read again the text : " Blessed be God, even the Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all mercies." What 
a title ! as if the progeny of God, all the sowing in His thoughts 
and purposes throughout the world, were mercies. " And the 
God of all comfort." What a title that ! The whole creation 
groans and travails in pain until now ; and God comes forth 
and says, " I am the God of consolation, of comfort." "Who 
comforteth in our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort 
them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we 
ourselves are comforted of God." The moment that a man 



Heroism in Suffering. 211 

falls into this higher mood, into any state of distress, and 
begins to find his alleviations by the inspiration of God, he 
says in himself, " Thank God for this experience ! " Now, if 
there is one there are a thousand, and I know the way, I have 
found where His mercy seat is. My trouble has been blessed 
to me ; and I will go to those in trouble, and I will say it is 
blessed to them also ; blessed be God that comforted us in all 
our trouble, that we may be able to comfort any in like tribu- 
lation. What a nobility of sentiment this is ! what an instance 
of effluent benevolence and sympathy with mankind is this 
word of the Apostle ! 

There are those who have been feeble, and laid aside from 
usefulness. I do not know that there is anything more trying 
to a man of energy and activity and pride than to find himself 
crippled, and to see the whole world going by him. He once 
had the power of the senate, he once had power over the 
assembly, but now his voice is feeble, and his zeal is spent, and 
men are saying, "What a man he was" as if he were but a 
mere trembling, shivering shadow now. Although sometimes 
the decay of mental faculties takes off the acuteness of suffer- 
ing, yet there be many men who have pride that will not be 
alleviated, and that cannot bear to see the world going past 
them, and they not keeping step but standing still. Not to be 
able to do what you once could do — to many souls there is 
anguish in that ; there is grace in it too, if you only know 
where to find it. Autumnal days are the most beautiful days 
of the year, and they ought to be the most beautiful days in a 
man's life. In October things do not grow any more, they 
ripen, they fulfil the destiny of the summer, and the thought 
of autumn is that it is going down, going forth. When all things 
in nature know and feel that death is coming near, do they 
sheet themselves in black as pagan Christians do ? Do they 
turn everything to hideous mourning as pagan Christians do ? 
They cry : " Bring forth our royal garments,'' and the oak puts 
on the habiliments of beauty, and all the herbs of the field 
turn to scarlet and yellow and every colour that is most 
precious; and the whole month of autumn goes tramping 
towards death, glowing and glorious. It is only men that make 
death hateful and gloomy and black, servants of midnight the 
whole of them. Why, when the gate of heaven opens into a 
man's house, one would think that it is the glorified life that 



212 Heroism in Suffering. 

comes pouring in. Oh, no ! they put linen over the pictures* 
they lock up the piano, and bring to the blinds, and everybody 
walks softly in the house. God has come, the Emancipator, 
He has come to crown some one, and we are all of us imitating 
the miserable hibernating animals that when autumn comes 
creep into a hole and sleep until spring wakes them up. What 
heathenism, what paganism is there ! Shall my child, taken 
out of my arms, go to the better school of angels? I have a 
right to weep ; Nature has its due ; but I have a right to rejoice, 
too, as did the mother that saw her child dying, and cried out 
in ecstasy : " I give thee joy, my darling ! " as it went up from 
her. And shall we that are disciples of Him that overcame 
Death by dying, shall we who believe that immortality lies just 
beyond the mortal, act as if Death were a tyrant ? Shall we 
put in our houses the skull and the crossbones, and the 
memento mori, and go, sheeted like pagan nations, down to 
the grave, and look in it, and not see anything there, and not 
hear what the disciples did when they looked and saw the 
angels and heard them say : " I know whom ye seek : He is 
not here : He is risen " ? To every truly Christian experience 
the grave is as a telescope, and as a magnifying glass, through 
which the world beyond and the triumph over this world are 
being celebrated. 

There is in warfare a heroism that hardly appears in moral 
life, not certainly often enough. When Badajoz was to be 
stormed, in the Peninsular War, under the Duke of Welling- 
ton, it was considered an unjust thing to select himself the 
regiments that were to be the forlorn hope, and, at the peril 
of almost certain death, storm the breach. He then called for 
volunteers, so that there might be no partiality. In many 
instances the whole body of soldiery rushed forward to volun- 
teer, and he was obliged to put them back. There is in war 
the feeling that the most desperate enterprises are those that 
the heroic want to achieve ; they want the chance of danger 
and peril. And . so it is in the kingdom of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. Men are often chosen, if they would but know it, 
because they are supposed to be competent to heroism under 
those conditions. Not every man is a poor man ; but there be 
many who, when they have been robbed by the hand of 
fortune, and especially by the injustice of that that gave them 
distinctions before, are cast down, and as they lose their 



Heroism in Suffering. 213 

property and go out of the big house into the little house, they 
say : " It is no use, my dear, our prosperity is over ; I never 
can make another fortune ; all our friends will fall off from us, 
and as we go through the streets people will say : There is 
the man that used to be rich." Good heavens ! you ought to 
be a thousand times richer than you were then — then you had 
outward riches, then you were in mere bodily conditions ; now 
stand up, if there is any manhood in you, if there is any holy 
or consecrated pride, for manhood is better than moneyhood. 
Ah ! you that have lost your money, and lost your courage, 
and lost your hope, and lost your faith, get out of the way ! 
But if you have lost that which gave you exterior position 
among men, and you can still stand up, and men can say, 
u He is grander than he ever was — no tears, no whining, no 
complaints, no conscious weakness — I never saw a man that 
seemed so manly !'' — oh, blessed man ! do you know that the 
treasure of the soul outmeasures all other treasures whatsoever ; 
and Christ says to you : " I want you to abound ; I will make 
you rich," and then you walk in more humility, gentleness, 
meekness, sympathy, and benevolence, never showing your- 
self so much a Christian as when dealing with those round 
about you that need you, not with men that can bring praise 
to you, but the men that can bring nothing but the opportu- 
nity for you to do self-denying work. It is a great thing to be 
able to stand and represent Christ in prosperity, but when 
Christ says : " Shift the scene," and the curtain rolls up, and 
you stand in the midst of your wreck and ruin, and when 
Christ says : " Now be heroic, show what grace has done for 
you ; show that you are a child of God in disguise ; make 
illustrious your faith, your patience, your kindness, gentle- 
ness, sweetness, long-suffering, uplooking trust " — oh ! blessed 
be the man that has thus the chance of representing Christ 
twice, at the top of prosperity and at the bottom of affliction. 
He will not forget you. Milton says : 

He also serves who only stands and waits. 

It is a great thing for a man to stand and be active and so 
get credit ; but it is a great thing, also, for one to be bed- 
ridden, to lie through weary days and nights uncomplaining, 
though pain be like a sword in the bones, to see the days 
waste and weakness holding you down. You say : " Why is 



214 Heroism in Suffering. 

this ? why is this ? " " Dear child," saith the Lord to such, 
" I have need of some one to exhibit patience and sweetness 
and goodness on a sick bed, and I chose you because I 
thought you could show it ; but, my child, if you are not will- 
ing for this office, let me raise you up, and some other hero 
shall be called." Methinks the heroic heart would say : "No, 
no ; let me lie, if only I may glorify Thee by being sweetly 
contented in my disease, in my sorrow, and in my trouble." 
You know that there never would be a rainbow if there was 
not a storm. There are many people that have storms, but 
there are very few people who know how to put rainbows on 
them. 

How far below these ideals, and this standard of living, is 
the average Christian experience of so-called Christian men 
and Christian women ! There are a great many people, I 
think, that will be saved ; they have got something in them, 
and they will be " saved, so as by fire." Well, I would not 
reject the glowworm. Though the glowworm does not compare 
with a candle, or with a star, or with the sun, yet it has some- 
thing after all of life in it. So there are Christians that are 
mere glowworms, emitting a furtive flash every now and then ; 
but how many are there of whom it may be said that the rising 
light grows more and more in thern unto the perfect day, they 
are triumphing over temptation, over selfishness and indolence 
and all self-seeking, and they are living so that no one can look 
upon them without saying: "This is a case of another sort, 
there must be the Divine power here, or no man could live as 
this man or this woman lives " ? I think there are probably a 
good many saints that go out of our churches ; but I think 
there are a great many more going out of our hospitals, and not 
a few out of our poor-houses, and a great many out of the 
lower walks of life. If the angels of God were to come and 
gather up those that in distress and poverty and suffering have 
maintained a holy faith and a godly life and example, they 
would garner from the bottom of society, and last, and with 
the smallest sheaves, from the top of society. "For the last 
shall be first and the first last." 

Now look for a moment at the disagreeable side of actual 
experience. When men are in trouble, accompanied by weak- 
ness and sickness, what is the fruit that is usually brought forth 
under such circumstances ? Why, complaining, fault-finding 



Heroism in Suffering. 215 

with Providence ; they do not know why they should not be 
prospered as well as the men the other side of the way ; they 
have not sinned worse than anybody else, yet they have broken 
down ; as to God being a Father, they do not find any evidence 
of it, and God's grace does not sustain them more than any- 
body else. So men sit at the door of poverty ; whining and 
complaining. How many men there are who in their sickness 
have chorused, " Disgusting ! odious ! " They count over their 
pains ; they want to show you their sores ; they strip off their 
bandages and hang them up as if they were so many banners. 
So they sit down together and mope and whine, and complain 
to each other, as if that were the way to get some comfort out 
of the misfortunes of their lives. It is time for such men to be 
buried. When men condole with each other let me be absent. 
But when men are sufferers, let it be with them as it was with 
the old shipmaster who had lost a leg. When I was talking 
with him he said to me in a cheerful way : " Why, my legs are 
my test of Christians." "How is that?" I asked. "Well, 
when a man comes in to me and says : ' Oh ! my dear friend, 
what a loss that must have been to you ! ' I know he is a 
discontented Christian ; but when a man comes and says : 
' My dear friend, you ought to be thankful you have one leg 
left,' I know he is a contented Christian, who looks on the 
right side of things." It is the pining over what we have not, 
and over what we have and do not want, that marks the dis- 
positions of men very largely. Discouragement, recounting of 
aches and pains, all forms by which we seek to make other 
men serve us, by which we seek by reason of our afflictions to 
be permitted self-indulgence — all those things mark any other 
spirit than that of the apostle, and that of true heroism in 
suffering. Many persons allow a child to be spiteful because 
he is sick. Bad practice ! And they excuse men that are 
rendered by sickness irritable and nervous. That is charitable 
on their part ; but they that are sick should of all other persons 
in this world seek to rule the spirit. They have no right to 
make others serve them unnecessarily, nor to be fitful and 
think they deserve compassion simply because they are sick. 
Be heroic in your sickness, and watch against the temptations 
of selfishness because you are sick. The whole opportunity of 
heaven is frequently thrown away and squandered. The same 
in all the humiliations of life, in poverty, in insignificance, and 



216 Heroism in Suffering. 

in inferiority. I know that Christians every day say a good 
many prayers ; the prayers are long, but the meaning is short. 
I have seen a great deal of praying in my day ; I have known 
people to beseech the Lord, and when He heard them and 
came to them they cast Him out and rejected Him with 
scorn. " Do that which is best for me." The Lord comes 
and takes your property. " O, Lord, O, Lord, I cannot bear 
that/' " Take up thy cross and follow Me ; give all that thou 
hast, and come and follow me.'' " He went away very sorrow- 
ful." He was very amiable, sweet-minded, and excellent, and 
the Lord is said to have looked upon him and loved him. He 
had a burst of enthusiastic friendship for Him, and he came to 
Christ and said, " I have kept all the commandments now, 
what else can I do to inherit eternal life ? " Christ gave him 
the touchstone : " Enter into that service in which God lives ; 
if you want to come into partnership with Me, be as I am; 
My whole life I hold for the service of others. Go, sell all 
you have, and come and follow Me in this blessed service." 
That was the end of the Old Testament and of the New to 
him, but he could not do it. It is a very solemn thing for a 
man to say, "Thy will be done." If God really consulted 
your best interests He would break that plan for you, but you 
do not want Him to, yet you say again to-morrow, " Thy will 
be done," and then comes some offer of Divine Providence 
that requires patience and self-government. No, you will not 
be patient, you will not self-govern ; yet the next day it is just the 
same, " Thy will be done." Then come losses and sicknesses 
and humiliations. God is dealing with you as sons. " What 
son is there that his father chasteneth not ? If ye be sons God 
chasteneth you ; yet when the chastening comes you always 
feel that it is a tyrant who has done it. It is God who con- 
trols His providence for those who are wise enough to know 
it and acknowledge it. All things work together for good to 
those that love Him ; not work together for your money, not 
work together for your political influence, not work together 
for your honour among men, or to give you genius, or 
eloquence, or anything else; but work together in such a way 
that you get what He knows is best for you. Oh ! if a man 
has only that faith, that God is dealing with him in such a way 
as shall be best for him here, and best for him for ever in the 
other life ! What a different state of mind will be bred in the 



Heroism in Suffering. 217 

man who can say : " If it be the will of God I can walk, I 
think, Christian] y in high places, and if it be the will of God I 
can go down to low places ; the will of the Lord be done ; 
though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." How hard it is for 
a man to pray "Thy will be done" who is looking at the 
fearful process by which it is done ! There is an old avaricious 
man who would have gone to destruction if God had not 
smitten his treasure-chest ; there is the mother that was grow- 
ing more and more idolatrous till God sent her little child to 
lead her thoughts up to the heavenly land, and she was after- 
wards, when the grief had ripened her, able to say : " It is 
good for me that I have been afflicted." "All ye that are 
weary and heavy laden," Christ says, " come unto Me." 
Come to have happiness conferred ? Not at all. " Come to 
Me, take My yoke on you ; My yoke is easy," when you get 
used to it. The yoke galls the neck of the steer at first, but 
afterwards it toughens it. "My burden is light." The voice 
of God is calling to us in all worldly experiences and trials and 
troubles, and angels are watching, seeing whether we are living 
after the spiritual man or after the temporal man. And when 
that day comes, that will soon come to most of us — to me and 
to you — and we go up, not those that have seemed to men to 
be the most illustrious shall receive the most radiant welcome, 
but those that have served Christ in extremity. Welcome, O 
thou whose head has been bowed in affliction ! thou baredst 
it graciously. Welcome, O thou, that didst come forth out of 
poverty ! thou didst live richly in the soul. Welcome thou 
that didst suffer reproach for righteousness' sake ! Then in 
that great day of reception, those that have suffered and 
rejoiced in suffering, and used their own suffering for the com- 
fort of others, shall stand foremost; and prophets, and priests, 
and bishops, and archbishops, and leading orators, in the 
pulpit and out of it, will come a long distance behind, for the 
children of suffering, that have been baptized in sorrow, and 
have risen out of their sorrows by the grace of God, will take 
the foremost place. " Who are these that have washed their 
robes and made them white ? " " These are they that have 
come out of great tribulation and washed their robes in the 
blood of the Lamb." 

These are the visions of the other life. Go home, Chris- 
tians, and think of these things, not of me, not of my sermon, 



218 Heroism in Suffering. 

but of yourselves and of your own hearts. Is trouble blest to 
you ; and being blest, are you saying : " This is the capital of 
my example and ministry ; I thank God, the Father of mercies 
and of all comfort, for the afflictions wherewith I have been 
afflicted, because now I know how to comfort them that are 
in like affliction " ? God grant you the mind of Jesus, and 
then take you to reign with Him. 



THE 

DOCTRINE OF REPENTANCE. 



' ' From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent, for the 
kingdom cf heaven is at hand." — Matt. iv. 17. 

" Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect, bul 
I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am appre- 
hended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
hended, but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, 
and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the 
mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." — Philip- 
pi ans iii. 12—14. 

JOHN began his ministry by preaching the doctrine of 
repentance, by which he meant a change of life and 
conduct, produced by a change of mind — that is, of 
thought, and feeling, and will. And when Christ, follow- 
ing, opened His ministry, He began where John left off 
and said : "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." It 
was a repentance not simply for the person's sake, but it was a 
preparation for a great spiritual development of which they 
were pioneers, and into which they were to enter — the spiritual 
kingdom of God. But the doctrine of repentance since it has 
become a doctrine has been very much mystified, and it has 
been preached almost until it strikes the minds of men as a 
mechanical matter. The essence of it is very simple. If a 
man is travelling and supposes he is going North, he is some- 
what weary, and finally he is informed : "You are travelling South, 
not North," and he stops and turns round and begins to go the 
other way — there is no moral element attached to that, but it is a 
simple illustration of that which substantially takes place in all 
instances of moral repentance. It is an awakening perception 
of there being wrong in some things or in some conditions and 
states, and it is a sense of not only being wrong, but of being 



220 The Doctrine oj Repentance. 

so wrong as to make it necessary that there should be a 
change ; and repentance is changing from any thing, or any 
course, or any character which appears to be wrong, into the 
opposite way, or that which is opposite. 

Now, repentance ranges from a mere matter of convenience, 
for we are repenting every day ; we are making mistakes every 
day, and when we rectify them we repent ; but in business 
matters and in little social matters we are not accustomed to 
call such changes repentance. The substance of repentance, 
although not the sum of it as attached to moral conduct, is 
familiar with every child and every man, and there is no 
mystery in it, except that mystery which comes from our 
ignorance in the higher operations of the human mind. So, 
then, a man may repent of his mistakes, of his sins indivi- 
dually, or of his character and his whole career, and the 
differences will be simply the differences that spring from the 
complexity of these higher stages over simpler and lower ones. 
Generally, repentance is expressed in the Old Testament : 
" Cease to do evil and learn to do well " — that is the whole of 
it. Stop being wrong, and get right — that is the whole of that. 
But men have been accustomed to hear repentance preached 
in churches and in revivals of religion, and they are told that 
they must pause, reflect, and that they must come to a serious- 
ness of mind ; that they must even feel the pangs and sorrows 
of conviction, and that finally they must be converted. By 
this time the thing has been mechanically taken out of the 
range of common ordinary life, so that men feel as though 
repentance were something very strange and something that 
belonged to the Gospel. The higher forms of it are found 
within the scope of religious duty ; but the thing itself is of 
every-day life and continual occurrence. So men may repent 
of a single act. A man being furious on account of his beast 
or servant, as the case may be, knocks him down ; and in a 
moment of restoring good sense he says > Sl I am sorry for it." 
He picks him up, if he is not up already, and he expresses 
his regrets, and makes all suitable apologies or remuneration. 
There is a complete repentance. The man did wrong, and he 
came to the sense of it ; he recovered himself, and did what 
was necessary to make that wrong all right again. A man may 
repent because he has told a lie — one single case ; and he may 
repent because he stole, and may make up his mind never to 



The Doctrine of Repejitance. 221 

steal again ; at any rate, he has repented of that one act. A 
man may thus be said to repent of his single actions, whether 
they be mistakes, whether they be sins, or whether they be 
crimes ; these are merely different grades of the same thing. 
Having gone wrong, we desire to reinstate ourselves as if we 
had not gone wrong. 

Then men may repent of a course of action, as, for instance, 
a man may fall into habits of gambling, and run a year in that 
direction, or into habits of drinking, and may run on through 
months. By-and-by he will have a survey of his life and of 
his prospects in the future, and there may come such power of 
meditation and of moral impulse to him that he says : " I will 
stop this thing ; I will stop it." Now, he has thought of the 
actions that were joined one to another till they have become 
habits, and he is determined to bring them to an end. Well, 
how much must he feel ? He must feel just enough to make 
him change, and that is all that is necessary. How much must 
a man feel when he has been going North, and thinks he is 
going South, before he turns round ? The only use of feeling 
in repentance is to make a man change. That which will 
make a man change is feeling enough, and the old midnight of 
horror that does not change a man is not good for anything, 
Men say it is being sorry for your sins. Yes ; that is an 
element of it ; that is a primary element of it. But what 
is the use of being sorry for your sins if you do not quit 
them ? No use at all. Sorrow is not broth that gives any 
digestible quality to a man's sin. The only use of feeling 
bad at all is to remedy something. If you feel bad in bone 
or muscle or nerve, on account of dissipation, the feeling bad 
about it, over and above the physical ache, is simply re- 
forming your manners, your way of living ; that is all it is good 
for. Pain is the incitement to reformation. 

Then, again, there is a repentance that is far more com- 
prehensive ; it is not repentance simply for single acts, nor for 
habits, but repentance over our constitutional and normal 
organisation. Men are not all made up in the same bundle ; 
they have very different constituent elements ; for although 
everybody has something of everything that goes to make the 
mind and the conscience and the heart, yet they are in very 
different proportions. As there are mixtures of flour and such 
other substances that make one kind of bread, and then 



222 The Doctrine of Refie7itancc. 

another kind, and then a different cake, and then something 
else — and there are a thousand combinations possible — so, 
when you come to take twenty or thirty different component 
parts of the human mind, and they are mingled together con- 
stitutionally in very different degrees and relations to each 
other, it makes very different characters ; and the whole 
operation of change under such circumstances varies from man 
to man. Thus one man's faults come from his being slow, 
lethargic, watery, puffed out ; he thinks slowly and acts slowly ; 
events run past him, and he is always catching at their hinder- 
most parts, as it were, and does not get them anyhow; his 
faults come from indolence and inertness, and his repentance 
would run that way. He has not nerve enough for his body, 
he has not activity enough for the functions of ordinary life. 
Another man goes to the other extreme ; he is all nerve ; he 
thinks quickly and feels quickly and intensely ; his tongue is a 
great deal quicker than a rifle ; he is angry quickly, and he 
does not always easily get over it ; in everything he is fiery 
and intensive. That man repents very differently from the 
man who is constitutionally indolent. Some men have a great 
deal of — firmness, the books call it, obstinacy, people call it — 
and their faults lie in that direction. Another man has a great 
deal of self-consciousness — dignity, some men call it, self- 
esteem, others call it, pride, others again call it — and his faults 
are of a different kind from the others. Now, in the re- 
adjustment of men's lives, it is not alone their outward con- 
duct that has to be readjusted ; we have to go through a 
process by which we shall equalise and subordinate all our 
internal dispositions to some common rule or standard. 
There is, therefore, another department of repentance which 
carries with it, not instantaneity, but the element of education. 
One man says : " My temper is my great trouble ; I repent 
of such a temper." Watch and pray, for you have got your 
hands full for a great while before you subdue it. Repentance 
in its nature is chronic ; it is not touch and go. Another man 
finds himself by nature a great lover of property, and through 
want of example, and other powerful temptations, he has been 
avaricious. At last he meets, in some great revival meet- 
ings, an impulse towards a higher life ; he begins to see the 
law of God, that love is that law, and that in all its modi- 
fications it is his duty to follow it. He has a constitutional 



The Doctrine of Repentance. 223 

tendency to property, to get it, to hold it, and not to give 
it away ; and he has got some considerable time in which 
to do his repentance. For although he may make a begin- 
ning, although he may have such a consciousness of his 
wrong disposition as that he says to himself : " I will, by the 
help of God, change it," he cannot, do it in an hour • he cannot 
get rid of the temptation to-morrow. I have known persons 
who thought they did ; I do not know whether their intimate 
friends thought that they succeeded as well as they them- 
selves thought they did. I have heard men say that, having 
been for years addicted to drink and tobacco, they prayed the 
Lord, and He changed their taste and their whole disposition 
in a minute. Brethren, that was a miracle, and we cannot, 
therefore, reckon that among common events. Miracles and 
common events do not stand in the same ground. I have 
heard men boast in my meetings of that wonderful change. 
I always rejoiced that there was such a change, for it would 
be rather hard to say to a penitent man : "You are deceived." 
If such things are done I rejoice in them. All I say is that that 
is not the way the Lord usually works ; that is not the way in 
which repentance usually changes men's dispositions. When, 
therefore, there are these constitutional inequalities and com- 
binations that are to be evened up, it is a process of moral 
education. Repentance is simply the first step — it is far from 
being the last step ; it is a continuous regret for that which is 
evil and a continuous aspiration after that which is better. 

But there is still more than that. As men go on in life 
every step of right living prepares the way for the next step of 
right living, a higher one ; and the moment you change the 
higher level of moral sense in a man you throw everything into a 
different angle. Thus, for example, a man is coarse in language, 
and gruff, and blunt, and people say : " He means well enough." 
He may mean well enough, but he does not do well enough. 
Then, dwelling in refinement, in church life, and working with 
godly women and supreme benevolence and gentleness and 
sweetness of temper, he sees how they get on, and it opens to 
him a new idea that there may be a blessing in a man's tongue 
for all that are near him ; by-and-by his wife tells him so, and 
he begins to believe it, too ; at last the conviction strikes him : 
" Why, here I am, coarse and rude and headlong; but I am 
going to do differently ; I begin to see that my bluntness does 



224 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

not mean truth or frankness or sincerity ; it is mere downright 
boorish rudeness." So he says to himself: "I will develop 
sweetness and gentleness and kindness of speech ; I will make 
my tongue a minister of good." The moment he begins to 
feel that there is a moral law in regard to that, how many 
things round about him change ! In regard to actions that he 
did not think to be bad he now says : " That would not be 
right, would it ? " New rights and wrongs spring up before 
him, and every step he takes he goes up. 

Take, again, a man who — honest or dishonest, as the case 
may be — has not been instructed, who is low down, and who 
feels as though keen bargaining were perfectly permissible and 
rather praiseworthy. He likes to recite how he got the heavy 
end of the bargain on that man, and he thinks he is praising 
himself for his smartness. At last he begins to come into 
such instruction that he says to himself, " I declare I begin to 
have a different idea of that." Before, he used to take the 
odd change himself, especially if a child or an ignorant 
woman came to deal with him. He always felt, "It is all 
right enough ; it is not very much, and I have a right to a 
little thing like that." But he begins to be ashamed of the 
little thing. Once he said, " Anyhow, business is a conflict in 
smartness between man and man, and if I can be smarter 
than that man that is his look out ; men must look after 
themselves. I cannot take care of their consciences." By- 
and-by he finds that he ought to regard every man as his 
brother, that his obligation is not to feather his own nest, 
but to see to it that everybody around him shall be profited 
and benefited and helped by him. The moment that idea 
of benevolence is in his mind, what a light it casts on all 
those sinuous ways, those faults, those peccadillos, those 
petty thoughts of selfishness ! The man's whole life grows 
more and more to him a moral schedule. 

So, then, with the increasing light that men have, their ideal 
of what is right and wrong increases also ; and that is one 
reason why men, as they really grow better, seem to them- 
selves more sinful than they ever did before. They are not 
more sinful, they are not as sinful, but they have a sensibility 
ot conscience that interprets a milder offence more severely 
than in the beginning a much sterner offence was by their dull 
conscience interpreted. So that you observe repentance is not 



The Doctrifie of Repentance. 225 

merely an instantaneous change got up at some particular 
time; it runs through a man's whole life, it follows him in 
every department of life ; everywhere, for the schedule of duty 
is so complicated, and the circumstances in which men are 
tempted and tried and buffeted are so many, that there is not 
a man living that has not occasion every single day to say : 
''Where have I fallen below duty? Where have I failed to 
fulfil the command of God this day ? " It would be a great 
mistake to suppose that under such circumstances a man must go 
through a fermenting process such as you see in times of revival 
of religion. Repentance then may begin at once, and may end 
at once, by a blow as it were ; or it may be a career, a growth, 
a change from evil to relative good ; it may be an education. 

Now, let me speak of the relations of sorrow or suffering to 
the feeling of repentance. There are great mistakes in respect 
of that in every way. All feeling is relative to the production 
of change. There are a great many persons who are urged to 
embrace a religious life, their past bad lives are pointed out to 
them, and men say to them : " You are a sinner, and you 
know you are a sinner, and that Christ died for sinners ; you 
ought to repent, have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and come 
into the Church." That is the common, familiar way of 
mechanical address. The man thus addressed says : "Yes, I 
know it, I know I am a sinner ; I fell with Adam, and my 
actual transgression has been piled up on the original sin ; I 
know I have to repent or I shall be lost for ever and ever ; but 
I do not feel, I have no feeling." Men seem to think that 
they have to wait till there is some feeling given to them. 
They are exactly like a locomotive standing cold on the 
road. You may say to it : " Take this train and run 
it to London," and the locomotive, if endowed with intelli- 
gence, would say : " I have no steam, I have to wait till they 
fire up. Then when they get up the steam I will do it." And 
men well instructed in life are standing round the Church or 
sitting within the Church and saying to themselves: "I hope 
there will be a revival, I hope that by-and-by something will 
happen that will convict me, I feel that I am a great sinner 
and need to be born again." They have an impression that 
that is indispensable. 

Now, how much wind does a vessel need to get out of har- 
bour ? A tornado ? A gale ? A fresh, strong-blowing breeze ? 

P 



226 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

Open your sails, and if there is nothing but a zephyr, if it swells 
the sail and gives steerage way, and you can go slowly out of 
the harbour, you have wind enough ; you might do better with 
more, but this will answer your purpose. Nay, more than 
that, men have an impression that the intensity of the feeling 
under which they are acting determines the quality of the 
change. You will hear Christian men in a church say : " I 
love the service of God, but I have always had my doubts ; I 
never went through any such process of conversion as I hear 
of with many men, and I have my doubts whether there has 
ever been an efficient work in my repentance." There is some- 
thing very fascinating to men's minds in a dramatic conversion. 
They see men of great emotion rise in the conference or in the 
class-room, or elsewhere, and say that they went on as sinners 
doing the devil's work through a long life, and one day the 
Lord appeared to them in a dream or came to them like a 
spectral appearance, and they were smitten to the heart with a 
sense of their sin ; they prayed and yet no light came, they 
could not sleep, appetite left them, and then they wrestled with 
the devil. They were told to repent, and they said, " I can- 
not." Finally there was a day when the Lord manifested 
Himself to them, and peace suddenly came to them. Now, 
far be it from me to say that there are not men who 
go through that career. I do not say that I think it is 
any worse than the other, I do not think it is any better. 
All that there is good in it is that the man was going 
wrong and has turned round and is going right. But take the 
case of a mild, gentle man, who, as a child, was never largely 
out of the way, who was always sweet and peaceful. Imagine 
one of these roaring old sailors, knowing all the wickedness of 
the world, and telling of the experience he had when God 
changed his heart, and then hearing this dove-like man say : 
" I never had any such experience as that." Of course not; 
it was contrary to nature that he should have any such ex- 
perience. " But did you not have such a sense of imperfection 
and wrong-doing, so that you abandoned many things behind 
and aspired to many things before ? " " Oh, yes ! but then I 
never had any such cleansing work." Cleansing work ! Do 
you suppose that feeling is soap and sand, and that it scours a 
man out ? That is how you mechanicalise the process. There 
are men overtaken on a summer-day with winds that capsize 



The Doctrine of Repentance. 227 

their boat. Some fall out on one side and some on the other. 
One set get ashore where, happily, the water is shallow, so that 
they are only a little wet ; the others get out where there is the 
eel-grass, the flags, the weeds, and all sorts of mud, and they 
have to wrestle with the bottom of the water as well as with 
the top. They are spent and weary, and they get to the land ou? 
of breath, and down they go on the beach. Those that escaped 
very easily are standing and looking at them panting, and they 
say to them : " Did you have such a hard time of it ? We did 
not ; we just waded quietly ashore. If you escaped I am afraid 
we have not, for we had no such time as that." There is a 
great deal that is dramatic in men's change under religious influ- 
ence that is material, and it is very deceiving and misleading. 

But more than that ; the idea that you have got to stop and 
wait for the steam to rise before you confess your sin and for- 
sake your sin is the very essence of ignobility. So far from 
its being a better thing it is a worse thing. Two children are 
quarrelling ; they have disobeyed their father and their mother, 
and they have come to blows, and they are both arraigned 
before the mother. One of them, as the mother looks upon 
him, bursts into tears and says : " Oh, mother, I am sorry, I 
am sorry,'' and he rushes to her and buries his head in her lap. 
The other says : "I am not sorry, and I am not going to be 
sorry,'' and the mother talks to him, but he pouts all the 
more. By-and-by she administers some punishment ; that 
makes him more obstinate, and he fights it out all the after- 
noon and evening. Then he is sent to bed without supper. 
Next morning he gets up and has nothing to eat. About mid- 
day, or towards night, he begins to come round, and finally he 
goes sneaking up to his mother and says : " Mother, I think I 
was wrong." Which was the nobler of the two dispositions? 
The moment that one of them saw he was wrong he gave up 
and confessed it j the other doggedly, obstinately, meanly held 
out. Yet men who are seeking religion often feel — "Why, I 
know enough to begin to change my life, but I am waiting for 
greater influence and sufficient persuasions and more helpful- 
ness." The more easily a man who has done wrong comes to 
God and confesses it the more noble it is. And if in your 
after life you are following out your purpose and resolution 
you are converted : for to cease to do evil and to learn to do 
well — that is conversion ; and if you require tremendous 



228 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

motives it is because you are tremendously bull headed and 
bad or else misinstructed. 

While not criticising any of the methods by which God 
brings men to a sense of their sinfulness, yet it may be said 
that the very first intimation that any man has of a conviction 
is when he begins to say to himself: "I am not living right." 
He has not any great experience, perhaps ; but he says : "I 
am not kind to my wife." Well, that is a very good place to 
begin with. Or he says : " I am neglecting my children," and 
he may feel very bad a good while before he does take care of 
the children. The moment you are convinced try it on • 
begin at the very first moment. But, you say, that is not con- 
version. Why, a man has to be converted five hundred times 
before he ever gets to heaven. I never saw any man so con- 
verted as that he did not need any more watching, any more 
repentance, any more help on the part of his friends, of his 
God, and of his own self. Let a man begin with this under- 
standing. "At every point as the light reveals it, and I see 
where I have been wrong, I am going to step back." Do not 
wait for a revival to come ; do not wait for some great stirring 
sermons ; be thankful if they come to your help ; but if you 
have any moral insight into the course of conduct and cha- 
racter follow that, follow it at once. Do you suppose that all 
those who followed Jesus were at once converted and became 
saints ? During His whole ministry His disciples were poor 
things ; they were converted because they undertook, according 
to their light and opportunities, to do better than they did 
before. 

And one step would lead to another. We do not mean that 
any man should think that because he has been unjust and has 
rectified it, because he has been stingy and becomes benevolent, 
he has become a Christian ; because to be a Christian is to 
adopt the whole schedule of Christ's life ; it is to substitute 
benevolence for selfishness ; it is to join yourselves consciously 
to the spirit of the everlasting God, that you and He may be 
one in motive and in feeling. But the way to come to that 
unity of heart with Christ's heart is to begin at every single 
step where you are wrong, and undertake to put it right. And 
if you want conviction of sin, try to live as you know you 
ought to live. If that does not convict you of sin I do not 
know what will. The attempting to be what you know a 



The Doctrine of Repe7itance. 229 

Christian life ought to be is a revelation to many and many a 
man. I believe that in thousands of cases it is after men have 
become Christians, and are converted really and genuinely, 
that they have the first real conviction of sin — that is to say, 
the conviction that springs from their increased moral sensi- 
bility, and from the development in them of affections and 
disposition that make sin exceedingly sinful to them. They 
never found out how wicked they were until they had advanced 
some steps in the direction of reforming their wickedness. In 
our country, where the original soil lies undisturbed, when it 
is first ploughed it is just as full of malaria as it can possibly 
be. Let it alone, and men are tolerably healthy ; but stir it„ 
and they all come down with chills and fevers. You undertake 
to plough up your heart, and you will find that there is malaria, 
there — you will find enough of it too. One of the evidences of 
a growth in grace is a growing knowledge of our frailty, our 
weakness, our wickedness, our pride, and the growth of that 
will throw its own interpreting light upon man's experience. 

Now I am coming to the second text, which seems not to 
have been connected with this. Paul says : " Not that I had 
already attained'' — speaking of his career. If any man was 
ever a Christian I think it was Paul ; and he says : " Not 
as though I had already attained or were already perfect.' 5 
What then, Paul? Why, "I follow after if that I may 
apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ 
Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended." 
He was not so lucky as many men in our day, who say they 
have become perfect. Paul said : " I count not myself to 
have apprehended : but this one thing I do, forgetting those 
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things 
which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the 
high calling of God in Christ Jesus.'' Paul persecuted, did 
he ever sit down and mourn over it ? He spoke of it with 
tender self-reproach ; but he had too much to do with the 
future to be groaning over the past ; too much to do with 
rebuilding to be criticising the old structure and delaying 
himself. " I have not become perfect, I have not reached my 
ideal, but I forget all the past," that is to say, "I do not stop 
to talk about my guilt, my wickedness, my unbelief, and all 
that sort of thing ; I just let that go ; it is past ; but for the 
future my life lies there ; I see what I mean to be, and I 



230 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

press toward it." Paul's life was in the future ; he lived by 
hope as well as by faith and love. 

Now there are many other persons who live just the other 
way : they live largely in re-hashing their sins and their sense 
of guilt. A man cheats the minor heirs out of their estate 
and holds it for twenty years. One of the orphan children 
dies, the others live in poverty. At last he is brought to 
his reason and his manhood, and he says to himself : " I can- 
not recall the dead ; that will be a sorrow as long as I live ; but 
I can reinstate the wrong ; " and he does it, and he joins part 
of his own estate to that of which he was the guardian ; he 
exalts the children into their proper station, and he rejoices in 
it. But there is always a wound in it, and after five years have 
gone by he says : " I cheated them," and he has a day of fast- 
ing and prayer every day over his old sins. Why did you not 
repent of them? When a man has repented of his sins, that 
is enough. Kick them out ; do not keep them like so many 
mummies or corpses in the house. When you have done 
wrong and found it out, and have changed to right, and have 
rectified all the ways in which your wrong-doing has affected 
anybody else, that is the end : the sum is complete ; you have 
no business to come back and sit down on your old grave- 
stones. Paul did not do it, and you have no right to do it. 

Now this has a wider application than men think. There 
are many persons who feel that it is their duty every day to 
confess their sins to God. Don't you suppose that He knew 
them before you confessed them ? Then look at the foolish 
way in which men confess their sins. They do not confess 
the sins they are committing every day — not one in ten of 
them. They confess generically that they are sinners; they 
are the descendants of Adam, and they have a dividend of a 
crime which they did not commit, but which their ancestors 
are supposed to have committed for them. It is orthodox, it 
is regular, it is the Churchly way ; so every day they go over 
a long list, and that it may be perfectly accurate it is written 
down precisely and printed in the book, and they go before 
God and read it to Him, because they think that God will 
like them all the better if they go through the confession of 
their sin. Now, if my boy, going through college, and misled, 
had drawn on me unduly, and had been caught in certain 
sprees, and finally robbed, I would settle the thing up at once 



The Doctrine of Repentance, 231 

and for ever. Suppose he came to me and said : " Father, I 
admit everything, I have been very wrong, but if you will 
trust me, this shall be the end, and you never shall hear any 
of these things again.'' I should say : " My boy, you shall 
never hear another word on the subject — the thing is done 
and gone." In the Prophets God is represented as saying 
to men that repent, " I will never make mention of your 
sins again." There is a way in which men forgive with the 
liberty of bringing up again what they have forgiven. "I for- 
give you, but I cannot forget." Why cannot you forget ? Why, 
because you want to use it for a fling. " Don't you remember 
what you did ? " — and so you have the whip over a man's head all 
his life. God says : " When I forgive I sink the memory of it, 
like a millstone, to the bottom of the sea, I wipe it out as it were 
from my memory." God remembers we cannot conceive how 
much. Yet there is one thing He does not remember. He 
does not remember what He has forgiven • the thing is ended 
with Him. Suppose that about once every six months my son 
should come into my house drooping and saying : " Oh, 
father, I know you have no right to trust me." " What, have 
you been at it again ? " "No ; I have kept my word, I have 

been all right, but I recollect " " My boy, I don't want to 

hear anything about that ; that is all done with, as if it had 
never happened." Then about a year afterwards he comes 
round again. " Father, I have been thinking over that college 

life of mine '' "Get out; you are no son of mine. No 

boy of mine can come to me in that way ; he is not of my 
blood or of my disposition. You did turn wrong and you did 
turn right ; you were sorry for it, and I forgave it. Do you 
suppose that I am keeping all these things in my mind ? '' 
Yet how many persons are there who will talk about their old 
sins ! If your old sins are hanging on, you need not call them 
old — they are new sins. As to this general confession of your 
sinfulness, do you suppose that the doctor thinks the better of 
the cripple who comes round every day to be attended to, and 
who begins by saying : " Doctor, you know I have a club foot." 
"Of course I do ; I have known it for five years." Or it may 
be that a man crumpled up by rheumatism begins by making 
a statement to his physician : " I have had rheumatism." " Of 
course you have, or you would not have sent for me." And 
you hear people going through a regular billet, a journalised 



232 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

and printed formula, which they say every Sunday morning, 
and Sunday afternoon, and Sunday night, and, for the matter 
of that, almost always in their prayers. " We confess our sins." 
Well, is there anything new ? You have confessed them about 
five hundred times, and God has forgiven them all the way 
through. If your old sins have broken out again they have 
been new sins, and God has still forgiven them ; you have 
asked forgiveness and you have been forgiven. When once 
you have repented let that stand. Yet how many think that 
they are very pious for saying : " O Lord Thou knowest what 
a miserable sinner I am," and other people sometimes listen 
and say : " What an humble soul that is ! " No such thing — 
it is a diseased soul. But then suppose that some great crime 
has produced remorse, would you produce that ? Remorse is 
the disease of repentance ; repentance is not remorse, and can- 
not be ; and no remorse is healthy that lasts long and becomes 
chronic. " Forgetting the things that are behind and pressing 
toward the things that are before, for the prize of the high 
calling in Christ Jesus." 

And the same thing is true in regard to a particular day set 
apart every year for a man to examine himself. Very few men 
examine themselves with reference to the future, their apti- 
tudes, their ambition, their desire, their purpose. That is the 
only direction in which there is any profit in it. Take the 
cases of self-examination, nineteen out of twenty of them. 
What fitness have these people to find out what is inside them ? 
If there are any visible signs breaking out into conduct they do 
not need any self-examination. If a man was drunk last 
Tuesday he does not need self-examination to ascertain that 
fact. If a man cheated, or swore, or did any other act of that 
kind he needs no self-examination to ascertain it. But men 
say : " Search your motives." I should like to know how 
many of you know what motives you have got, how many of 
you have any such knowledge of mental philosophy as that 
introspection does you any good. The law of motives and the 
law of combined motives- how many of you know anything 
about it? It is a very subtle thing even for those who are 
intellectually exercised in such matters. Men are told to look 
down into their own hearts. As an illustration and as a very 
powerful passage in the sermon that may have some consider- 
able influence. A man that lights the candle and goes down 



The Doctrine of Repentance. 233 

into the passions, into the dungeons of his own nature, may 
see a good many things that will scare him, but he will not 
have much knowledge of himself when he comes to the light 
again. You know perfectly the course your life is taking, and 
you can judge what the tendency is. You know whether your 
dispositions are towards honesty, towards gentleness, towards 
kindness. That comes by inspection from without ; but to go 
dow T n within, to go into the dungeon, you can know but very 
little in that way, and that mostly through mistakes. I do not 
believe in the setting days apart for self-examination. Life 
every day gives you the opportunity of wholesome self-examina- 
tion. Every man ought to know what he is about. " Am I lazy, 
or am I active ; am I self-indulgent, am I living for to day, for 
myself, and for the hour?" Everybody knows that without 
much introspection. " Am I suspicious, am I jealous, am I 
envious ? " You know these things ; your neighbours will tell 
you if you do not know, and there is no necessity of intro- 
spection under those circumstances. Do you pay your debts ? 
You know perfectly well whether you do or not. Are you 
charitable? You know whether you are or not. Is prayer 
spontaneous? You know whether it is or not. Have you 
conscious communion with God? Is the influence of the 
Divine Spirit resting on you as the sunlight on your garden ? 
Men know whether it is or not. A vast amount of mediaeval 
self-torment yet lives in the Church, and instead of doing good 
it does a great deal of harm. Do not go back into the rubbish 
of old days ; date every day anew, and go forward. 

Well, that which applies to self-examination — if you will 
allow me to say it with all tenderness — applies to old sorrows 
or recent sorrows. I have seen men, and women particularly, 
who have lost dear friends, and are plunged into the greatest 
suffering ; and one could hardly rebuke them, though a higher 
standpoint of Christian allegiance would largely alleviate the 
breaking of natural cords and fond relationships. If we believe 
that Jesus rose from the dead, and that He will take with 
Him those who died in the Lord round about us, that ought 
not to be a groundwork of excessive suffering. But nature will 
have its own. Christ Himself wept, and He permits us to 
weep. But is it of the spirit of Christianity that men should 
wear their sorrows outside ? The door of death is the door of 
hope ; the grave is that lens through which we see immortality. 



234 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

It is the point at which all burdens fall off, and all temptations 
cease, and all sins ; and when our friends come to this inheri- 
tance of perfection is it right for us dolefully to sit down and 
nourish our griefs and sorrows ? If you go into a house and a 
valetudinarian or an infirm person begins by telling you how 
his food affects him, and what his symptoms are, and how his 
liver is acting all the time, and what kind of whirling round 
there is in his head, you soon begin to feel — well, fully satisfied 
with the information that is given. To-morrow, he begins it 
again, and the next day again, and then if he wants you to see 
all the sores he has on his arm you say : " Look here, my 
friend, keep your clothes on ; I don't want to see your sores." 
There is nothing more disgustful in the world than the talk of 
the sick about their sicknesses ; it is well enough to tell it to 
the physician, that he may know what it is, but that should be 
the end of it. After a little while, as men get well, that all 
passes away, or should pass away. Now, taking not the out- 
ward life of the body, but the inward life of the soul, I cannot 
endure to see persons muffle themselves from the midnight 
loom because they have lost a child. It looks an unfilial 
thing in the perverted public sentiment because no mourning 
is put on. I do not know that I am obliged to see your grief 
paraded on your back. Piety is not midnight, it is sunrise. I 
understand perfectly well, and I would be very lenient and 
gentle with those who, following the fashion, are afraid not to 
dress in mourning for fear it may be accounted as a want of 
affection for those who are gone, and they would not have the 
world suppose that they were indifferent to their loss. There 
is on that side a shade of amiableness ; but then, on the other 
side, a Christian mother, a Christian father, a Christian hus- 
band or wife, under a great and crushing affliction, ought to 
stand up and let the world say : " We know what a grief they 
have felt ; but see how they mount by faith and hope and love 
above it." One of the strongest persuasions of religion is the 
capacity of a religious man to bear losses and troubles with a 
serene, sweet, cheerful, and singing disposition. This outward 
mourning is a sign of weakness, not a sign of faith, nor neces- 
sarily of affection. 

Let me close by saying again, that the life of a Christian is a 
life of one who, conscious of evil, determines henceforth to 
live a higher and a nobler life. The Christian repentance is 



The Doctrine of Repentance. 235 

the repentance of those things that are forbidden by Christ, 
and it is a growing up unto Him in all things which He com- 
mands and exemplifies. And in that work let no man suppose 
that he can repent once for all. 

Repentance in its very nature is distributive. In our very 
nature we are like children at school who learn their lessons ; 
they are more or less dull, and every time they go aside from 
their purpose of education they are sorry for it, and they have 
reapplication and intensity at the next hour. We are all im- 
perfect. We come short of the glory of God ; we come short 
of our own purposes ; we look back upon our lives, and see to- 
day that we purposed to go all day long in the bright sunshine 
of hope and love, but before night comes there are storms in 
our sky, there is fretfulness in our sky, there is injustice ; and 
when the sun sinks down we say : " I would have done good, 
but evil was present with me." " The good that I would I do 
not, and the evil that I would not that I do " is the experience 
of every man. What then ? If a man is travelling and slips 
and falls, does he sit still? or does he say : "lam not a tra- 
veller " ? or does he say : " I will get up and go back " ? No ; 
he gets up and goes forward. And at every step of the Christian 
life our infelicities, our want of right dispositions, our indolence 
confront us. For life is very large and multifarious, and 
the events are multitudinous, and there is no person that every 
day will not have occasion to say : "I have not done that 
which I meant to do ; I have not reached the standard I set 
before me." What says Paul? "This one thing I do, for- 
getting the things behind, I reach forward to the future; 
I have put behind my memory, my failings, and my sins ; I do 
not count them any more — they are all gone and done, with. 
This is my life, to hold the idea of duty and rectitude and ten- 
derness and love and activity, and every single day, instead of 
looking back to see how much I have come short of it, I look 
forward and take a new lock at the standard of duty — I go to- 
ward it, I work toward it." In that course you save yourself a 
vast amount of mischance, of mistake, of worry, and useless 
trouble, and you have the sympathy of God. " Like as a 
father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear 
Him. For he knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are 
dust." We are weaker in His sight than we are in our own ; 
we come short in His sight more than we do in our own ; never- 



236 The Doctrine of Repentance. 

theless, He takes us with the compassion and the capacity of 
a father who takes a little child in his arms and carries it. Let 
us not, therefore, fall into these stupid furrows, these ways of 
repentance which are external, which are very often merely ag- 
gravations rather than benefits to us because we have done 
wrong. Live to-day by your standard, and so far as you come 
short, say : "I am sorry, but, Lord, I come to Thee." And 
take a new start, and so day by day live by faith of Him that 
loved you, and gave Himself for you, and who ever lives to 
intercede for you and to succour you. 



THE DIVINE ABUNDANCE. 



" Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all 
that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him 
be the glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout ail ages, world 
without end."— Ephesians hi. 20, 21. 

THIS is the climax of, perhaps, the noblest expression of 
religious emotion that ever fell from the lips of man. 
The preceding verses, together with this, are something beyond 
all parallel as "0 experience : — 

" For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he 
would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened 
with might by his Spirit in the inner man ; that Christ may dwell in your 
hearts by faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able 
to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, 
and height ; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, 
that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God." — Ephesians hi. 
14—19. 

There is an immeasurable sweep in that. No man can hear 
it without falling down before it, without saying, "This is a 
poetical inspiration, but it is a thing not practicable. No man 
can reach as high as that, no man can live in that atmo- 
sphere." Therefore comes by way of encouragement another 
opening, as it were a dash through the clouds, and a vision of 
God. It is a vision meant not merely to teach us something 
of the magnitude and wonder of the Divine nature, but to give 
us an interior view of the Divine nature that should inspire 
hope and confidence and certainty in Him. Having made 
this majestic flight round the rim of the universe, and 
praying that it might be all theirs, the Apostle says : " Now 
unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all 
that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in 



238 The Divine Abundance. 

us, unto Him be glory in the church." It is a presentation of 
the highest Christian model idea of the nature of God. It 
does not praise Him because He made the world and all that 
is in it, nor because He sustains it, nor because of His 
privileges, nor because of the history of His grace, and its 
unfoldings through the ages. He rose higher than all these ; 
though they are eminently worth our consideration, this is 
something higher — the work of God in the human soul. And 
in delineating this for encouragement it gives a conception of 
God that, perhaps, has no parallel anywhere else, even in 
Scripture. It is not an abstract possibility that the Apostle 
here sets forth in the character of God, namely, that God can 
do anything, that He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. 
Those things are all true, but this abstract view does not come 
home as it should. The view here given is a view which 
tends to inspire hope and courage and gladness — that God is 
able to do all the things that we have asked, able in such a 
sense as that we may expect that He will do it, that He is 
the helpful God, the inspiring God, the all-succouring God, 
God as the Nurse of the soul as well as its Schoolmaster and 
Leader and Judge and Rewarder. We rejoice to think of 
the future, of the triumph with which the emancipated soul 
will come into the glory of the Father's kingdom, the wonder 
of that word which not all music can ever express, 
"Welcome !'' We love to think of those future things, but 
just now we are a great way off; we are bending under our 
burdens in lite, and they make us crouch and sometimes 
crawl ; we are in dimness, and sometimes in darkness ; we are 
certainly sinning, and we know that it is doubtful in our mind 
whether we have any right to believe that we are in any way 
redeemed. We are in the battle, and what we want in this life 
is something that can take hold of us in the midst of the 
struggle with the temptations, the strifes, the failures, the 
blindness, the unfaith of this mortal life. And here we 
have it. 

The extraordinary intensity is worth a moment's considera- 
tion. Men that are very certain of things generally express 
themselves not merely strongly, but if they have the slightest 
poetic temperament they heap epithet on epithet, intensity on 
intensity. Things that men are doubtful about they state 
stealthily and carefully, little by little, and with argument, 



The Divine Abundance. 239 

binding it by various ways to men's belief. But there is no 
such process as that here. " Now unto Him that is able to do 
exceeding abundantly." Abundance? What is that? It is 
enough, and more than enough. A table spread with sufficient 
for a man's hunger may be enough, but it is not abundance. 
If there is an apple for each child round the table, that may 
be enough, but it is not abundance, as any child will tell you. 
Abundance means carrying a thing over the economical line ; 
it is not merely what will just supply, but it is a heap on heap. 
And when we speak of abundance, we naturally take our 
measure from the measure of human or daily life. Abundance 
is limited by human conditions. That which is abundant for 
the peasant is not abundant for the well-to-do farmer. The 
peasant has, with much labour and economy through the 
summer, got in his little store of esculents, and he has his 
single rick that may, perhaps, give him grain, or may feed his 
cow, which is a dependent of the family, and he has reasons 
for gratitude, and he says : " Now we have a good stock of 
fodder for the coming winter; we have enough." But a few 
acres off there is a farmer that has twenty ricks, and more 
roots than he knows what to do with. Compared with the 
other man, what abundance he has got — everything for the 
barn, everything for the stable, everything for the cellar, every- 
thing for the house for every month of the year. " Oh," you 
say, " he is well off ; he has abundance of support." But go 
to the capitalist who owns a hundred farms, who is receiving 
his pay in kind, and pours his stream of produce like a river 
into the market. What is the abundance of the plain farmer 
compared to his ? And when you consider that of royalty, 
with imperial wealth, having the election of all the world's 
things, it puts to shame the abundance of the others. Give a 
little child a bit of quartz set for a brooch ; she has never had 
anything of the kind before ; she puts it on her bosom, and 
goes, round, and stands so that everybody can see it. and what 
a treasure it is ! What delight and what joy ! But now go and 
look at the diamond that flashes upon the hair of nobility ; it 
puts the poor little stone of the little girl out of countenance. 
To her it is everything, but when you go up high enough it is 
nothing in comparison. Now, abundance in God as compared 
with any conception that we have of abundance, if you carry it 
up by that measure, step by step, beyond those that are with 



24° The Divine Abundance. 

us, beyond those that are rich, beyond emperors and sovereigns, 
beyond the utmost treasure that earth can heap together, what 
must be infinite abundance ? 

Well, that was too cold, " Exceeding abundantly." The 
word seems likely to break down under that. " Exceeding 
abundantly " must mean no miserly God. No, no ; no hard, 
stern God that will finally be persuaded, like a lock that has 
not been oiled, but you wriggle the key in and work it, and 
by-and-by it grates and falls back open. No such God as 
that. " Unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly." 
Well, do what ? More than we ask. Well, how much can a 
man ask ? What end is there to intelligence ? If a man gives 
consideration to it, what a sphere of asking there is ! If a man 
should say to me : "When you are in trouble, Mr. Beecher, 
at any time, and want fifty or a hundred pounds, draw on me, 
don't hesitate/' I should feel that I was pretty well lifted up 
anyhow. To some of you who are richer that might not be 
much, but it would suit most folks. But suppose, instead of 
that, a great business firm should say : " You are a stranger 
here in England ; if you want a thousand or two draw on us," 
that would be a greater scope still. But suppose, again, that the 
Bank of England should say to me : " Never stint, draw ad 
infinitum, don't care how much you draw " — what should I 
think if I had that permission ? All that I can ask ! "To 
Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly" — He is my 
banker. " Above." You see you began too low. It is " exceed- 
ing abundantly above.'' Above what ? All that you can ask. 
His bounty only begins to show itself when you have ex- 
hausted the possibilities of your asking — that is what the 
text says. 

But that is not the end of it. "Or think." Why, I can 
think ten thousand times more things than I can ever ask, 
because, when I think, it is not thinking, it is the feeling that 
makes the thinking in me. When I am sick and feeble I have 
very little that I can ask beyond this: "Give me health;" 
but I can think a great many things. By my thoughts I have 
ubiquity ; by my thoughts, without ship or sail, I am at the 
North Pole ; by my thoughts, without steam or any such help, 
I am under the equator ; by my thoughts I am where the 
morning is the whole year round in summer ; by my thoughts 
I fly without wings, I run without feet, and am everywhere, as 



The Divine Abundance. 241 

quick as the spirit life is supposed to dart everywhither ; the 
heavens above, the mines in the earth, all lands, all territories, 
wherever they may be, my thought traverses them all. I think 
of dear little children, and I think of what I would do if I 
could only touch the sick mother and bring her to her feet 
again. I think how I could build hospitals and schools, and 
how I could gather up the lost in a thousand ways. I think, 
I think, and I think ! " Now unto Him that is able to 
do abundantly above all that we can ask or think." That 
great word " imagination,'' that great productive word 
" thought," not half of it could ever be reduced to words. Do 
you not know that human language records the chaff and the 
straw, but not the wheat of life ? No man that ever had a 
heart worth calling a heart could ever tell the most precious 
pait of loving. No person could ever express with sensibility 
the element of the beautiful that reigns in Nature. No 
person's generosity could ever frame itself into anything like a 
thought in that unbounded expanse of human life where all 
things come into us, and part of them come with aerial wings 
because they will not be incarnated in gross matter, or in 
speech, or in language, which was made up first from the 
bottom, and only grows gradually to express the finer thoughts 
and feelings at the top of life. And yet this is that which the 
Apostle held forth for the disciples. 

But that is not all. Now turn back a little, and see what it 
was that he made this the appendix to. The codicil of the Will 
is greater than the Will itself. " I bow my knee to the Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the riches of His glory, 
to be strengthened with might by His Spirit" — not out of 
rheumatism, nor out of neuralgia, nor out of decrepitude, but 
"in the inner man," the energy of your being and the quality 
thereof — "that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." 
What poor, miserable sawdust and chaff it is to hear men 
quarrelling and fighting about whether Christ was Divine or 
not ! What does He care what we think about that ? " That 
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; " so that you are 
transformed into little Christs ; as one might almost say, the 
emotive substance, not as to scope or authority, but the dis- 
positions that make Him what He is should become transferred 
to you in small miniature Christs. That is what every one of 
us ought to be. " Strengthened with might by His Spirit in 



242 The Divine Abundance. 

the inner man ; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; 
that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to 
comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, 
and depth, and height ; and to know the love of Christ, which 
passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness 
of God." 

Now it is on the top of that that our text comes in. " Now 
unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all 
that we ask or think" — that is what he has been asking, that 
is what he has been thinking, and so there is something trans- 
cendency higher and more abundant than that in God — " to 
Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all 
ages, world without end. " I can worship such a God ; I can- 
not help it ; I dissolve in the presence of such a God as snow in 
the presence of the summer sun. It is not my duty, it is my 
necessity. If there is a God so glorious in love, patience, 
grandeur of benefaction ; if He has given us such inspirations 
and liberties as are indicated here ; if He stands above all the 
swarms of human beings that, like so many worms and so 
many inferior beasts, are wrangling and quarrelling with each 
other; if He stands over this great world that groans and 
travails in pain until now, and yet says : this is the genius of 
God, He overhangs creation with this disposition out of which 
comes everything that is good in man, and is attracting every- 
thing that is good in men to lift them up little by little, higher 
and higher ; if this is His Providence, if this is His grace, if 
this is His life, if this is His business, and has been from 
eternity to eternity ; if this through the long ages, in spite of 
all the inexplicable things that are in them, and all the seeming 
contradictions, if this is the eternal summer of God Himself 
overhanging creation, oh, what joy ! what rest ! I rest in God. 
If this be your God, do not let anybody cheat you out of Him 
by any other doctrine. This is the view which every one of us 
is permitted to take — infinite goodness inspiring goodness in 
us, waiting on us weak and struggling men, waiting by what I 
may call the eternal nurse, Love. 

Now, in contrast with such a view, let me call your attention 
first to the mean and meagre views of God commonly taken. 
The average view of men of some education is that God is a 
Being of infinite power and infinite wisdom. Well, He may 
have infinite power and infinite wisdom, and not be much to 



The Divine Abundance. 243 

me. I go by many and many a mansion which is magnificent, 
well-built, and most beautiful ; but I do not know who is living 
in it, and, therefore, it is not much to me — the brick and 
mortar. So with God, who is the great moral Architect of the 
universe ; there are moods in which we admire and rejoice, 
but, generally, what do I care when I am sick and broken 
down, when all around me is desolation and darkness, that 
God made the stars ? Stars are no medicine and help to me. 
What do I care for all these things in the infirmities and neces- 
sities of my mortal struggle here ? 

Others think that He is a God of justice. What is justice ? 
It would puzzle you to tell. I hardly know what name to call 
it. My own impression is that, taking the history of justice, as 
it is called, through all periods of time and through all de- 
velopments of the world, justice is a thing that you cannot do 
without, and that you cannot live with. It is another form of 
organised crushing ; it is a blind avenging ; it is a dreadful 
thing, justice. And yet there must be justice somewhere ; 
without it things would run into interminable confusion in 
this world. But, taking your ideas of justice from the limita- 
tions of it that we see in society at large, tell me that God is 
just, that He sits in Heaven, and has a system of law over the 
universe, and that His business is to see that law maintained 
and continued, that He is, therefore, nothing but a great 
engineer oiling the machinery of a great manufactory, and 
that He cares for nothing so much as for His machinery and 
His law of government — is that God ? 

But then " He will by no means clear the guilty." He is an 
avenger. Oh ! that is what men dread. It is that there is 
infinite strength out against infinite weakness ; infinite know- 
ledge out in the universe as against infinite ignorance ; infinite 
integrity as against infirmity at every step. And what sort of 
comfort would a man have in looking up to the heavens and 
saying : " I have a God of justice ; I have a God of creative 
power ; I have a God of vengeance '' ? I would run and hide 
myself. I do not wonder that the day is described pictorially 
as coming when men shall pray that the mountains may fall 
upon them and cover them from the wrath of the Lamb. So, 
then, making a kind of compromise, men have heard that there 
is a sort of redemption from this God, that He has arranged 
it so that if men submit and repent — and repentance does not 



244 The Divine Abundance. 

generally go very deep in this world ; it is like ploughing with 
a scratch plough, no subsoiling in it ordinarily — that if they 
repent they will somehow be saved. But oh ! where is God ? 
Where is the star ? Where is the shade in the weary sun ? 
Where is the shadow of a great rock ? Where is the tree of 
life bearing its fruit every month, with its leaves for the healing 
of the nations ? Where is our companion God ? Where is 
God in us the hope of glory in any way of thinking like this, 
mechanical, earthly, and too often sensual ? Suppose one 
should try and make a portraiture of God. I do not wonder 
that the Jews were forbidden to make any picture of Him, or 
carve any statue of Him, or have any form of worship ad- 
dressed to any physical and visible sign. That way goes to 
the grossest form of idolatries ; for the pull down towards the 
material is always greater than the uplifting towards the 
spiritual. But suppose a man should undertake to paint a 
portrait of summer — I think he would have a. big job on his 
hands — to paint the morning light, to paint all the dewdrops, 
to paint all the birds, all the trees, all leaves, all mosses, all 
blossoms, all fruits, all that is going on when the whole hemi- 
sphere is glittering with riches. I think he would want a 
pretty big canvas. Therefore men are content to paint only a 
tree, or a bit of water, or the rising or setting sun, and they 
are called artists. I should like to see a man that could paint 
a hemisphere. There is not any such thing possible. Yet 
here are men that get together a few attributes of God, which 
we conceive by virtue of our material organisation, and 
they call that God, and they put it down in the Con- 
fession and in the Catechism, and then stand and say to every 
man : " Open your mouth and swallow it, or we will damn 
you." Is there any being so abused as God? He is good- 
ness and glory, exquisite loveliness and tenderness, long-suffer- 
ing, gentleness, patience ; and yet when men paint His portrait, 
there He sits saying : " Sin, and you shall be destroyed unless 
I find a release for you.'' Is that a representation of summer ? 
Is it a representation of a summer God that makes all things 
grow, that is cruel to nothing but winter, cruel to nothing but 
barrenness and poverty ? And yet what better God have we ? 
What do you think of every day ? If one is a lover his love 
perfumes everything. As he rises in the morning, every thought 
of her i> sweet. He goes to his toil, works all day, and says : 



The Divine Abundance. 245 

" Oh, I could work twice as many hours, if necessary, to prepare 
the dwelling for us." And then, when they are brought 
together, and the signs and hints of love have really blossomed 
and come to the very fruit of love, and he journeys far away, 
the thought of her makes the journey itself easy ; the annoy- 
ances and the dangers are all nothing ; love destroys them all. 
And with what speed love brings back the wandering swain or 
husband, as the case may be ! Oh, what power there is in 
love ! And now look at the God of attributes as He is taught 
to us — the God of intellectually crystallised attributes. He 
is just so much, and no more ; so far it is true, but if you go 
beyond that it is not true. Is that a God of love ? Too 
long the Church has undertaken to present this false por- 
traiture of God. The Infinite. Infinite in what? In power? 
To be sure; but in power that He does not choose to use 
except on matter. Towards the human soul the Lord is 
" gracious and slow to anger, abundant in mercy and goodness 
forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin." While He is in the 
work of building men up into purity and holiness, and will 
not give them up, will not clear the guilty, and make it in- 
different whether a man is good or bad ; while He is doing 
this grand work in the universe this is the mood and dis- 
position in which He does it. Where do you find that por- 
traiture? Oh ! in many a heart. I would to God it was in 
many a pulpit. 

And why do Christians have so little comfort as they have 
in God ? Why do they take so little comfort in this view ? 
It is because they do not really feel as though God was their 
own God. How does a son feel in regard to his father and 
mother ? How does one feel in regard to great riches and 
estate if one's father and mother have them? They are his, 
too, because he is theirs ; if they have titles and honours, he 
has them, too ; the father and the mother overshadowing like 
a generous tree, every child having the fruit dropping into 
its lap. Why do not men carry that same idea into the 
relationship between the Father God and His chudren? Men 
are low-minded ; they are material ; they care for this outward 
life ; they care for praise from men ; they care for honour and 
riches ; they have no conscious need of God ; the things they 
are set upon are things that perish in the using. Well, but 
what about the eternal future ? They do not know exactly 



246 The Divine Abundance. 

how it is, but then it does not come to-day, probably not 
to-morrow, and they hope that by and-by they will make a 
turn somehow or other, and get into the land of promise 
and be saved. But they go on through months and years, 
not having any conscious need of God, and, therefore, they 
do not search after Him, and do not try to bring down His 
life into their life. 

Idolatrous reliance on the mere means, of churchly origin, 
is another reason why men come short of this knowledge of 
God. Men have a feeling that if they do these things that 
have been prescribed for them by their religious teachers they 
may not be the best off, but they are safe anyhow ; if they 
keep the Sabbath, if they are reverent at worship, if they aid 
in accordance to their means, if they do all the duties to the 
poor that are incumbent on them according to the measure of 
their ability, then — "What lack I yet? You cannot expect 
everything from a man. The Church tells me to do these 
things, and I do them ; is not that enough ? If not, tell me, 
and I will do more." And this is a substitute for rest in God. 
There is a great deal of difference between doing duty and 
doing love. When Christ had His disciples with Him, for a 
long time they were obliged to depend on His direction ; but 
one day He said to them as they began to blossom out into a 
larger spiritual comprehension: "Henceforth I call you not 
servants but friends." They had gone up higher ; they had 
come within the conscious realm of His own heart ; no ordina- 
tion, no touching, could be a substitute for that. " I call you 
My friends." That is the coronation of the soul when Christ 
says that to any of us. 

Now, the Church is not to be despised, and ordinances are 
not to be despised, unless you put them in the place of God ; 
they are not to be despised if they lead you up to God, and so 
vacate themselves. A ladder is a thing that a man must leave 
every round of, or else he will not get to the top. If a man 
takes just one step on the ladder, and stops there and roosts, 
the ladder is of no account to him ; the rounds of the ladder 
are things to be left behind or below. Multitudes of men 
there are that are so busy looking at the rounds of the ladder 
that they do not see the angels at all up there ; they are look- 
ing down to see if they are stepping right. So it is with men 
who are very conscientious, very cautious, very ignorant, and 



The Divine Abundance. 247 

much misinstructed, that the very means of grace, which 
otherwise should have lifted them up, are their damage and 
their injury ; they are substitutes for God. 

Then there is a false view of God taught in theology. It is 
taught that men must repent before God will care for them. 
It is because God cares for them that they can repent. He 
cares for them before they repent, or they never would. Do 
you suppose that it is the growing up of the asparagus, the 
grass, and the spring flowers that brings the spring ? or is it 
the spring that brings them ? Do you suppose that our deter- 
minations and purposes and wills and all that can bring God 
to us ? It is His drawing that brings us to them. And yet 
how strong is the feeling ! Ah ! my soul, thou knowest it 
well — I lie down dead as a thorn. Was a man ever taught 
by a nobler father than I ? And yet what weary days I have 
known, and what an utter degradation of spirit and soul does 
it seem as I look back upon it now, when I thronged the doors 
of the house of prayer, asking men to pray for me — as if 
Dr. Humphrey or anybody else was nearer to my soul than 
Jesus was ! And what utter repetitions ! " Lord, convert me ! 
Lord, convert me ! Give me evidence ! Give me evidence ! " 
I held my soul as a man might hold a watch, and stop it to 
see whether it had been going or not. The evidence of a man 
is his life. Start in it at once and you have the help of all 
heaven. Begin — move. Ah ! when a man has been nearly 
drowned and rescued from the water, and brought home, the 
wife, in distraction, fills the house with shrieks, " He is dead I 
he is dead ! " And there is every sign of death on him. By- 
and-by the physician, applying his remedies, feels, and he 
thinks there is a faint deep breath • he holds the glass to his 
mouth, and it is bedewed, and the word goes out, "He is 
alive ! he is alive ! " and the whole house roars as it were with 
hope and joy. The man is not walking about ; he need not 
get up or sit down at table ; he cannot do anything ; but the 
slightest touch of evidence that he is beginning to live has in it 
the whole promise of the future. 

Now, if a man wants God he wants the higher life in God ; 
it is not for him to wait till he can robe himself in saintly 
garments and say : " Lord, I have complied with Thy con- 
ditions, accept me." No man is ever going to be accepted of 
God except as a babe is accepted by its mother ; and of all 



248 The Divine Abundance. 

things that ever lived on this earth there is nothing so near 
zero as a new-born babe. But there is a provision in the 
mother of a love overpowering, more than the child needs by 
day, more than it needs by night ; a myriad preparation for all 
that the child shall need is waiting — waiting on his develop- 
ment, waiting on his first dawn of thought and intelligence, 
waiting on his crooked dispositions, waiting on him all the 
way, and the mother is the living sacrifice for the child to 
guide him to manhood, to virtue, and to truth. And shall a 
mother be all this to her child, and we not understand what 
God is to every struggling human soul — the life of our life, the 
inspiration of our dulness, the light of our darkness and our 
hope and joy? This is what faith means — taking these decla- 
rations in respect to God as if they were true. A man stands in 
a garden and says : " What is this tree ? " "A pear tree," he 
is told, and he believes it. "And what is this tree ? " " It is 
a rose tree," and he believes it. Yet when God has made 
known to us the infinite depth and riches of His grace we 
analyse it, and we ask : " How can it be, consistently with this 
and consistently with that ? " Take it, believe it ; trust it, live 
it ; that will settle it. 

But, coming to the question of punishment and reward and 
justice, do you separate justice from love? "Whom the Lord 
loveth Hechasteneth." Chastening comes from justice, but it 
is love that inspires the chastening and inspires the justice, 
There is no separation in the Divine mind between the 
element of loving and any other ; it is the one grand element 
that includes in itself everything else. The wrath of God is 
love, the penalties of God are love ; they are schoolmasters, 
they are mothers, they are leaders. Do not stop outside and 
say : "The justice of God may meet me in the way." As a 
figure of speech Bunyan has made it very vivid indeed ; 
nevertheless, the unity of the Divine nature is seen in the 
Divine compassion and Divine love. Well, why do not all 
men get it if that be so ? W 7 hy do not all men get 
sunshine when they are blind ? It is there, only they have 
no organ to receive it. " To as many as received Him, to 
them gave He power to become the sons of G d." Open 
your heart, open your soul to this faith and the benignity and 
hounty of God, the infinite tenderness of the Divine love — 
Jet it warm you, and you will begin to have perception of it. 



The Divine Abundance. 249 

A man may put himself in a bomb-proof house, with a slate 
roof, and stone walls, and closed shutteis, and say : " Do not 
tell me summer is coming; I do not believe it." Summer 
never comes to dungeons, whether they be human hearts or 
old castles. Be sure of one thing, that you will never go 
wrong by trusting God — not trusting Him as if He did not 
care what became of you, but trusting Him as if He did 
care what became of you, trusting Him as one who is more 
solicitous for your up-building and establishment in purity and 
truth and in all qualities of excellence — more anxious for that 
than you are a thousand times. Do you suppose that my child 
cares as much for his education as I care for him ? I know 
he does not. Do you suppose that he cares as much for his 
honour and his well-doing in life ? He has no such large con- 
ception of life, he has no such sense of experience as I have 
for him. I feel more for my children than they do for them- 
selves. You do feel for yourself, and God feels more for us 
than we do for ourselves, in that He knows more of what the 
destiny of life is, what the greatness and grandeur of life eternal 
is, and what the awfulness of losing life, after spending it here, 
in the eternal dark is. 

So, then, with this conception of the glory of God, it seems 
to me I am justified in asking every person to accept God as 
He is known to us in Jesus Christ for every purpose of life. 
I beg all you who have walked along in a formal righteousness, 
and are Christian moralists, to look up to the light. You have 
the twilight as we have the twilight through these windows, 
but not the clear shining of the sun. There is many a man 
walking in Christian life that does not walk under the full 
blaze of the light of God in Christ Jesus; there is many a man 
that goes through the process of conviction, and then the 
experience of conversion, and then he undertakes to live in a 
certain degree conformably to his vows and promises. But 
that is a very different thing from having the day-by-day 
voluntary and involuntary sense of God with us, loving us 
strengthening us, helping us. 

And I ask all those that have never named the name of 
Christ : Is not a God of this universal bounty and helpfulness 
a God that you can trust ? Do you dare to set at naught the 
riches of His grace, and, in the face of infinite patience, 
goodness, gentleness, go on to sin and harden your heart ? 



250 The Divine Abundance. 

Can you do it, and then call yourself an honourable man ? If 
one plunged into the stream to save you and brought you out, 
and he only received buffeting at your hands, what kind of a 
man would you be ? If one had supported you during sick- 
ness, and supplied you with all you needed, or shielded you 
under false accusation, and you turned traitor and sought his 
downfall, what kind of man would you be? Ought you not 
rather to herd with beasts than call yourself a man? And 
shall you take day by day the infinite goodness of God, His 
provision, His mercies, even physical and temporal, much 
more the overhanging atmosphere of Divine mercy and 
goodness, and not worship Him with all that have been 
redeemed, and join, while you live, in the cry : " Glory and 
dominion be to Him that loved us, and gave Himself for us, 
and washed us in His own blood " ? 



THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING. 



" For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son 
whom He receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as 
with sons ; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not ? But if ye 
be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, 
and not sons. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which 
corrected us, and we gave them reverence : shall we not much rather be 
in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live ? For they verily for a 
few days chastened us after their own pleasure ; but He for our profit, that 
we might be partakers of His holiness. Now no chastening for the present 
seemeth to be joyous, but grievous ; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth 
the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised 
thereby." — Hebrews xii. 6 — n. 

THIS, after its sort, is a kind of philosophy, a phenome- 
non of human experience. Everything in Nature, 
according to the measure of its power, is happier than a man. 
Life is brief and uncompounded in the lower range ; it is not 
tormented by fears ; it has no to-morrow, it has no remorse ; 
its hours are few; but, so far as we can judge, the insect flits 
through the brief period of its life without a sorrow and 
without a trouble, and though death may come by violence it 
is not anticipated ; it does not come so much by slow 
approach, it comes instantaneously, and everything below 
man seems to fulfil its destiny along the line unchecked of 
cause and effect. But the moment you rise above the animal 
kingdom you find man in everlasting conflict with himself, 
with his social surrounding, with society, with hope and fear 
of the future. Man alone is the one miserable creature on the 
earth, and yet he is called the Son of God. Men have been 
studying how to create happiness that should be undisturbed 
and unbroken in this world. They have discovered a great 
many things, invented a great many things, found out a great 
many medicines and remedies ; happiness has eluded their 



252 The Mystery of Suffering. 

search. Single persons seem to have struck the harmony, but 
in multitudes, in nations, in ages, the whole creation has been 
" groaning and travailing in pain." Moralists and poets have 
descanted on the subject. This world has been called a vale 
of tears, a land of sorrows, a land of disappointments ; from 
the cradle to the grave men have alternated between smiles 
and tears. A steady flow of happiness, a soul that knows how 
to keep time as that watch knows how to keep time, has never 
been born, and does not live. We flit between light and dark! 
Now, happiness is certainly, we may believe, the final end 
of creation. Whatsover maketh a lie or causeth offence in the 
grand land of consummation will have been purged out, and 
happiness without alloy will yet be the end of every true life 
that by sorrow and suffering has been wrought out into the full 
possession of its birthright. The process or education of man 
in this world proceeds on the law of suffering — happiness the 
graduating point ; suffering the academy, the seminary ; and 
the best teachers are the teachers that inflict suffering on man. 
And so clearly is this declared in this sacred philosophy of our 
text that it is said that a man is not a man that does not 
suffer ; and especially in his relations to God a man is a 
bastard that dodges suffering, gets rid of it, gets out of it. It 
is the law of God. Now, suffering is taught not only as a fact, 
but there are in this wonderful book of Revelations, among 
all its horses and clouds and trumpets and armies and various 
symbols, some of the most exquisite truths wrought in between 
to be found in any of the books of the Bible. " One of the 
elders answered me, saying, What are these that are arrayed in 
white robes ? Whence came they, the radiant ? I said unto 
him, Sir, thou knowest ; and he said to me, These are they 
that came out of great tribulation, and have washed their 
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb " (that 
is, in the bath of suffering ; for Christ's blood means 
suffering) ; " therefore are they before the throne of God, and 
serve Him day and night in His temple, and He that sitteth on 
the throne shall dwell among them." Clear down to the last 
vision they are highest that have been most suffering in the 
great school of this life. It is the law of education. Why it 
was made so, if you know, please instruct me. There is that 
why. Why did God make things thus and so ? Why did He 
so develop human life ? Why did He make this the road 
through which humanity was to travel ? Why did He make 
the law of suffering the law of education, rather than the law 



The Mystery of Suffering. 253 

of happiness ? This why pours into the gulf of ignorance. 
We don't know. We are ignorant in proportion as we go back 
to the beginnings of things. These are secrets that no science 
will penetrate ; at any rate, not for ages yet ; these lie hidden 
in the bosom of God. But Christ is the type of the moral 
kingdom of God. The sufferings of Christ have been alleged 
to be on this, that, and the other ground ; let him take comfort 
and consolation who may out of the several theories that have 
existed. It was necessary to make the Captain of their salva- 
tion perfect through suffering, because He was leading the 
multitude, the whole world's population, towards elevation 
through suffering, and He entered Himself under that august 
law of the universe, suffering. The blood of Christ means 
suffering, as He interprets it Himself: "Greater love hath no 
man than that he should lay down his life for his friends." 
And the suffering and death of Christ, the shedding of His 
blood, which is equivalent of parting from life, is meant by 
His own interpretation to be the measure of the love that He 
has, and has had, upon the race. He is the Captain, through 
suffering, of men that suffer. It was necessary for Him, 
because it was necessary for Him to pass through the same 
road that we all have ourselves to pass. It is a badge of 
discipleship — suffering is. Men do not come to the fulness 
of their relation to God except through it. No man can blink 
it ; no man can dodge it ; no man, be he ever so wise, can 
escape it ; nor should he want to. The mother of Zebedee's 
children wanted her boys to go to the highest pinnacle without 
any suffering, and the reply, mysterious to them, is clearly 
discernible to us in its intent : " Can you drink of the cup 
that I am to drink of, and be baptized with the baptism ? :J 
And they in the innocence of their ignorance said : " Yea, Lord 
we are able.'' And the reply intimates : "You shall have your 
cup and your baptism ; but as to the reward which you seek 
outside of suffering it is not mine to give." And it is not 
anybody's to give ; it is not God Almighty's ability to give 
without a violation of the whole law of the Divine economy. 
Now, look at the scale of suffering. The first is physical 
pain, which is the lowest ; it is cautionary. Pain oft-times is 
like the thick-set hedge along the edge of the precipice, and 
men would go over if there were no caution or warning. If 
they grumble at the thorns, the thorns are their salvation ; other- 
wise they might have gone stumbling on and been pitched 
over. It is cautionary. The remembrance of it prevents a man 



254 The Mystery of Suffering. 

violating some natural law ; that is, some law that has its seat 
in the physical structure of the man's own body. A child has 
no knowledge. It gains knowledge by suffering. A child has 
no conception of the law of gravitation till he has tumbled 
downstairs or out of his bed. He has no knowledge of fire, 
no knowledge of the suffocating influence of water. It comes 
little by little. The knowledge of natural laws and the violation 
of them bring quick pain to him, and is his schoolmaster, in so 
far as a very limited extent of physical suffering is concerned. 
Physical suffering, or pain, as we should call it, is vindicatory, 
and, in its vindicatory life, pain, in some respects, is instan- 
taneous, in other respects it is dilatory. In some respects it 
avenges the violation of the law early and vigorously ; in other 
respects it lets it lie long through years and years, and punishes 
in mid-life and in old age the transgressions of youth and 
strength. But he that has violated a physical law does not get 
rid of it. It grips him, though it may not choke him ; it holds 
him, as a lion holds and sports with its prey before he eats it. 
No prayer will set a man free from the pain of the violation of 
physical law, and yet there is something provided in that ; there 
are remedial tendencies in the human body — a kind of fore- 
taste, or, rather, a foresight in material creation of that which 
comes, in a larger and larger way, in the intellectual and the 
moral development of the race, a remedy for the transgressor. 
So, then, there are pains that are vindicatory not only at once, 
but far along. Some of them without possible atonement in 
them, some of them more or less remedial in their constitution 
and nature. Yet even this, the lowest form of suffering — 
namely, bodily pain — is not without its relations to education, 
and to the development of a true and high manhood. It 
teaches men patience ; it teaches men to bear valiantly. Many 
and many a man has been burned at the stake without so much 
suffering as a man has had in his bed through ten or fifteen 
years' suffering and pain, and if during all that time while the 
body anguished, the soul is learning self-control, endurance, 
bravery, faith, even physical pain becomes a missionary and a 
minister of grace. Cheerfulness under physical suffering is a 
wonderful victory, repining is a defeat. I suppose that there 
is more martyrdom of a quiescent kind than there ever was of 
a flaming. I would rather be broken on the wheel outright — 
horrible as it is, yet it has this benefaction in it, it is immediate 
and you get through it pretty quickly — than be a man that has 
the gout. He is broken on the wheel through days and nights 



The Mystery of Suffering. 255 

with no terminable period before him, again and again with 
recurrent anguish. A man who being a martyr in suffering for 
a principle is inspired with heroism, and can go to the stake 
and bear torments is not so great a man as the man that with- 
out publicity and without any great moral end in view never- 
theless has courage and endurance to bear up under these 
various bodily tortures. If a man shirks down, if he sneaks 
into complaints and all forms of bewilderment, and dissipated 
faith, he is wretched indeed, and there is no moral end gained 
under such circumstances 

Then, aside from the suffering which comes to us through 
our bodily organs, there is that suffering which comes to us 
through the law of evolution in ourselves ; the law of conflict 
between the lower man and the higher man, or, as St. Paul 
phrases it, " between the flesh man and the spirit man." If, 
in unfolding ourselves from childhood to manhood, the process 
goes on by which we subdue the animal that is in us, and the 
passions that belong to it, by the ascendency of higher social, 
moral, and intellectual inspirations, then suffering is more im- 
mediately and perceptibly a schoolmaster. Here is the full 
sphere where self-denial comes in. Nobody is obliged to deny 
himself when the thing that he wants is the right thing. Pain 
in and of itself is a curse. Suffering in and of itself, 
without any moral end, without any prophecy of purpose 
in it, suffering is not good, and yet there are multitudes 
of people that are wearing hair shirts and sitting in sack- 
cloth on dust and ashes, and are inflicting pains and suffering 
on themselves, not because they know anything that they are 
going to get by it, but because, somehow or other, they think 
that something will come out of it that will be a fair equivalent. 
Any suffering that does a man good has its equivalent in his 
character in lifting him higher. In old times of war men 
fought at the walls or before the city ; driven in, they fought 
within the walls and on the walls ; driven thence, they retreated 
street by street ; by-and-by nothing but the citadel was left, 
and in that, on the highest point of rock, and the most firmly 
fortified, they held out and endured to the end. And so it is 
in life. Men are driven up higher and higher towards the 
citadel of God, by the sufferings which take place in the 
conflict between the lower and the higher man. 

Living largely in the west in my early life, I had the oppor- 
tunity of beholding phenomena that are good illustrations. 
When the great western rivers .were suddenly swollen, and 



256 The Mystery of Suffering. 

booming freshets came tearing down, flooding the country on 
either side, I have seen the river Ohio, that was not a quarter 
of a mile wide, ten miles wide in the flood. Nothing is more 
familiar to the settlers than the fact that the animals are all 
driven from the lower places, and frequently it is the case that 
they mount to some round hill, and the water following 
surrounds it, and they are imprisoned on that hill. But 
they still go higher up and higher up and higher up until 
they get a place that is a refuge. Suffering that teaches an 
animal to go up ought to teach a man to go up. 

Then suffering is still on another level, where we suffer by 
our social relations, where we suffer with and for each other ; 
and here is the beginning of the grandeur of the kingdom of 
suffering. It is not our sinning that occasions suffering on the 
social plane ; the other qualities are now the ministers of pain. 
Do you suppose that the cry and the pang of the mother 
springs from her sin ? She brings her child into the world 
through her own pangs. Blessed be the name of the mother ! 
From day to day she ministers her own body, from night to 
night her own wearing watchfulness. She lives for the child 
and in the child. If it be weak it is dearer than if it were 
strong. If it be strong she glories in it, and through the 
imagination outbraves the future. If it be brought into 
difficulties, who but she is in sorrow ? Not the child itself 
suffers so much in its adversities, little or great, as the mother 
suffers for it and with it ; and it is not because she has been a 
transgressor, but it is because she has been God's angel that 
she suffers with and for the child. Thus the law of suffering 
enlarges as you ascend upon the scale of developed being. 

Vicarious suffering, then, I may say at last, is the law of the 
universe. Men have disputed whether in Christ's great mission 
and atoning the law of vicarious suffering could be justified, 
and they have reasoned very sagaciously upon the minimum 
of the question. Christ entered into the world to partake of 
those very things that the race have passed through, " Tempted 
in all points like as we are," tried into all points as we are; and 
as it is the law of social connection that one shall suffer for 
another, Christ suffered for men under the same great grand 
law of vicarious suffering. That is a wretched child, that is a 
wretched man, who has no one to suffer for him. Take the 
common popular phrase, "Oh! those children have nobody 
to care for them"' — care, watchfulness, and pain are inherent 
in it. Every child coming up from below wants somebody to 



The Mystery of Suffering. 257 

suffer fur it in thought, in feeling, in self-suppression, in energy 
of love ; and any person coming into this world without 
some suffering for it is a bastard, with no father or mother 
morally. 

Then, higher than this, or rather more extended in its rela- 
tion, is the suffering which men have in civic relations. Men 
are not individuals. Man is a collective animal; every man 
stands on his own stem, but he also stands on the trunk which 
holds up a million' stems, and if anything afflicts the root it 
afflicts everything at the top. Although blossom is not identi- 
cal with blossom, nor fruit with fruit, human life is made up 
of individualisms, but collected and made into one great 
organisation. And so men must suffer when society suffers. 
Wars bring suffering not to the evil-minded but to everybody ; 
revolutions inflict generic sufferings upon the race and upon 
the age : riots spread abroad suffering not on the principle of 
desert, but simply on the principle of our connection in civic 
unity. Commercial depressions do not take down the adven- 
turer alone, but they take his family down, they take the 
colleague firms down, and though it may be in your counting- 
house that the thing began it runs out through the looms and 
the anvils, and all the multiplied wheels, and it is felt for a 
period far and wide, and those who are not responsible or 
capable suffer as much as they that are, on account of our 
civic connection. 

Then next and yet higher, men suffer on account of their 
moral relations that unite them to man and to God and to 
the universe. The progress of knowledge is through suffering. 
One man suffers, and leaves a glow of new truth behind him, 
which irradiates the whole of a generation. The man had to 
suffer for it. Indeed, it seems to be the law in yet imperfect 
and corrupt human nature that when a man brings in a great 
good, men are so afraid that it will oust their lower good and 
investments that they all join together to pelt ; and, if they 
can, to destroy, the man that brings the greater blessing, so 
unwise and ignorant are they. Men are cast out wandering in 
the wilderness, of whom the world is not worthy because they 
are seeking to bless the world. There are men in your gene- 
ration, or that have but just passed out from it, there are men 
against whom the cathedral and pulpit have thundered exe- 
crations, that are God's angel messengers bringing into the 
world a knowledge that will be for the salvation of the gene- 



258 The Mystery of Suffering. 

rations in days to come. They suffer ; you reap. It is this 
that led the Apostle to rejoice in his infirmities — that is, in 
all the sufferings and the breakings down that came in his 
life, not on account of his infelicity, nor of his sins, nor of his 
unripe character, but because he was bringing into the world 
untold blessings. If the Saviour that came to bring immortal 
life was Himself crucified, shall His servants that come 
bringing in some small portions of blessing expect to go free ? 
If the bearer of the thorn-crown is your Father, are you 
afraid of the nettle? The law of suffering is the law of 
honour, of emancipation, of glory in this lower state. The 
Puritans were not a perfect race, but they knew how to suffer 
for a great cause ; and you reap the benefit. The Covenanters 
were far from being perfect men ; but they that deride them in 
our day are not worthy of them. Their outside, like that of 
the shellfish, might have been crustaceous, but the inside was 
glorious. So with the Huguenot and the Reformers in our 
day. Robertson, who stood in Brighton preaching a wonder- 
ful Gospel then but little known, finding himself unpopular 
and frowned upon by his own church, has opened the gates of 
peace and salvation to thrice ten thousand souls. Oh, that 
we might suffer ! Oh, that we were accounted worthy to 
suffer ! Oh, that we could so advance the interests of God 
among men that ignorant men should pelt us with stones 
and stone us as Paul was stoned. The cross is the emblem 
of glory. 

Thus far we can see and understand. But the world is the 
workshop of heaven. There we shall see the consummation 
of that which we see but feebly and understand but partially. 
The law of suffering runs on beyond, I believe, in multitudes 
of cases, although the final consummation is perfect and 
increscent joy and happiness. Many there are on earth 
who see no outcome ; they are underfoot, they are out of 
place ; suffering seems not only to bring to them no relief and 
no inspiration, and no help and no hope, but it seems never 
to have declared its real nature to thtir surroundings or to 
their generations. Oh ! there will be a land where these 
things will be known ; there will be an interpretation to every 
pang and to every tear and to every crushing sorrow ; and 
as for those who suffer for a noble cause, who suffer for 
children, who suffer for those who have no parents, who suffer 
for the community, though they are accounted unworthy, and 



The Mystery of Suffering. 259 

are cast out by the community, though they be crushed out of 
life and hope, and go mourning all the days of their lives, 
there is a reckoning — that is to say, there is to be an un- 
folding of the reasons of their suffering, and the results of it 
which do not by any means all appear upon this mortal sphere 
and in this limited life — it is to be made known. 

Look at these magnificent structures that are growing 
up on every side, and look down into the deep pit 
where the cellar is being dug, and where the foundation- 
stones, huge and rude, are laid. On them is the wall, 
and by-and-by you come through much developing 
beauty to the cornice and the frieze and to all the carved 
statues. There is the glory of the architecture. You 
may walk through cathedrals and round about them, and 
through palaces, and you may say : " How beautiful is this ! " 
and there are the poor great stones at the bottom, groaning 
and saying : " We hold the whole up : yet nobody sees us and 
nobody pities us." That is so in this world ; but the men 
that are the foundation stones in this world will find that the 
last will be first and that the first will be last in the other 
life ; they shall not be hid, they shall be developed in that 
great day. Did you ever see a mosaic, a picture made of 
little stones which can be brought in by the bushel or the 
basket or the cart, and not one of them worth sixpence ? 
Take them up individually, and they are of no particular value 
or beauty ; but when the artist, upon the pliant background, 
uses one and another and another and another, and, having 
finished in darkness, withdraws the curtain, there shines out 
the resplendent image of Christ ; He is made up of all these 
little insignificant bits of glass and stone. Here we are mere 
fragments ; but when, after death, we are put together by the 
hand of the artist, God, we shall find that though individually 
we amounted to very little, when we were taken collectively, 
and put into proper relations, the glory of the Lord will shine 
out of our individual smallness. 

I heard a conversation once in the mountains. There was 
gold that had been wedged in among the rocks, and had 
heard that gold was a wonderful thing for value and for 
beauty ; and it was murmuring and saying : " Here I 
lie, and here I have lain for centuries ; I am gold, 
and I hear stories of what gold is for value and for 
beauty and for power; but here I lie in darkness crowded, 



260 The Mystery of Suffering. 

and hurt, and crushed." The engineer says: "Well, if you 
want to come out and shine you shall;'' and there is great 
joy in all the ledges until the powder explodes and they are 
torn to atoms and thrown all round about. " Oh, oh, oh I 
this is what you have promised us — that we should have joy y 
liberty, and beauty." They are trundled into waggons, lifted 
with the earth, and as the light dawns on them they say : 
"Well, it may be alleviated a little, but this is a hard way to- 
answer our aspiration." Then they are put down under the 
stamp, broken up with mallets, and at last ground into powder. 
They give up in despair : " If this is making us beautiful gold 
we would rather go back to our ledges." Then the water 
takes out the rock, and the gold lies scattered, and it is then 
poured into a bath of quicksilver, that eats it all up ; the gold 
has disappeared, the particles of quicksilver have got it all 
inside themselves. It is collected and carried out, and then 
by heat the quicksilver is dissipated, and the gold finds itself 
lying under the sky, pure — nearly ; then it goes through the 
process of perfect purification, and, at last, it passes into the 
Mint, where it takes the image and superscription of the 
Government, wears the crown, carries the sceptre, and it is 
sought by all men, and is used in all places, and at last through 
much tribulation it enters into the kingdom of glory. 

You do not know what is going on, you do not know all the 
meaning of your sorrow ; God does. Do you suppose that 
the wool on the sheep's back knows what it is coming to 
when it is sheared ? When it was scoured and washed and 
spun, and twisted of its life almost ; when it went into the 
hateful bath of colour ; when it was put into the shuttle, and 
was thrust back and forth, back and forth, in the darkness, and 
out came the royal robe, it did not know what it started for ; 
yet that is what it comes to — kings wear it. The flax in the 
field sighs to be made into the garment of the saints. All 
right. Pluck it up ; rot it, put it under the brick, thread 
it, weave it, bleach it, purify it ; and the saints may wear 
it now. It came to honour and glory through much 
suffering. "Who are these arrayed in white? These are 
they that have come out of great tribulation and washed 
their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." 
Suffering is God's guardian, guiding angel to those that will ; 
it takes them up through the gate of trouble and trial to that 
land of perfectness and of everlasting peace. 



The Mystery of Suffering. 261 

And you do not know what your suffering means ? Yet 
you may rejoice in the general fact that somehow or other it is 
going to make you glorious if you are only worthy of it. Allow 
me still one more figure ; for some may take one figure easily, 
and some another. When this organ was built the lead and 
the zinc did not know what the men were about when they 
were melting them, and making them into pipes, and when 
the work was distributed through the different shops among 
different hands. Here you have the sesquialtera and the 
mixture — hideous stops unless they are masked or hidden 
under a great weight of sound. If you tried them in the 
factory you would run out with your fingers in your ears, and 
cry: "Lord deliver me from that sort of music!" Then 
there are the flute stops, and the diapasons in their grand 
under tones. With all the different parts of the organ sepa- 
rately made, unconnected, nobody can tell what is coming 
except an experienced workman ; but by-and-by, little by little, 
the frame is erected, the stops are all arranged and in con- 
nection with the wind chest, and now that it is an organic 
whole every part plays into every other part. As a whole, it 
is magnificent ; but the separate stops were poor and weak 
and unsatisfactory. God makes stops on earth, but He builds 
the organ in heaven ; and many a man will never know till 
he comes there what was the reason of that providence by 
which he was trained and fitted to be of that great band of 
music in the heavenly home. 

Thus far illustrated and explained the subject will give rise 
to some applications. And, first, no man should hunt after 
suffering, any more than a man should hunt after sickness. 
Yet the ascetic heresy was this — that there was something in 
suffering, over and above the Divine nature and application of 
it, in the suppression of passions. They had a faith that a 
certain quantity of suffering here would secure an equivalent 
of joy there. Not that it sweetened them, not that it enlarged 
them, but it was the price of suffering paid for an era and a 
quantity of joy. Many people punish themselves now, think- 
ing that that is the way to earn something by-and-by. All 
suffering that does not end in the production of more beauty 
and strength and sweetness of character is suffering thrown 
away. Do not regard suffering as if it were in and of itself a 
means of grace. If it makes you better it will come of itself. 
It is a pitiful thing to see men who in the main are living the 



262 The Mystery of Suffering. 

life of Christians unconscious of the great meaning of suffer- 
ing, and trying to make the best of life they can, and, shooting 
out above them, many misdirected men of the other extreme, 
who suppose that moral development and moral excellence 
are to come only through self-suppression, who run to the 
cave to find sanctity there, as if they had not to go there 
themselves. A man that sleeps with himself sleeps with the 
devil. They run to all sorts of torture and torment, as if 
abstract suffering were an equivalent for abstract holiness. Do 
not hunt after suffering. Anything that is lawful and right is 
yours. The whole round realm of Nature, everything that is 
pure and just and of good report, the Apostle says : " Think 
on it " — that is, ponder it for the purpose of appropriating it. 
You need not trouble that you will not have trouble enough 
if you will accept it. 

Secondly, lower animal suffering is penalty for sin ; but, 
going up the scale, it is not punishment, but the other way. 
Men suffer because they are so good ; they are the vicarious 
sufferers for those who are not good, through sympathy, 
through pity, through endeavour to help them, through self- 
repression for the development of those that are round about. 
Therefore, when you find yourself suffering, do not undertake 
to say: "Lord! what have I done? Why am I afflicted 
when other persons not so good as I am go free ? " If any- 
body goes free he is a bastard ; you are God's son, and what 
son is there that the Father chasteneth not ? Men work for 
the comfort of their own families, for their own pleasure, but 
God that He may make us partakers of His holiness. Do not, 
therefore, suppose that simply because you suffer you are set 
apart of God and made an example. You are under the law 
which Christ lived under, which all human families live under. 
Yet I have seen such anguish and sorrow, young mothers 
mourning over their cradle and saying : " What have I done 
that my babe should be taken from me ? " It may be that there 
is some reason in you ; it may be that there was a schooling 
going on in you to prepare you to take care of others' babes 
— to be a nurse to those that have not your blood. It 
is not your sins necessarily that bring suffering, certainly not 
in the social and the spiritual sphere. 

The end and aim of life, I remark again, ought not to be 
happiness, but fitness for happiness. It is not happiness that 
we should live for, but condition, conduct, character. And 



The Mystery of Suffering. 263 

yet men are living as if there never had been a Saviour, nor a 
Cross, nor blood. Men are attempting with all their might to 
make this world a great conservator of their happiness. They 
buffet themselves, and through every inventive agency, and 
through all their ambitions and the wide scope of their desires, 
they are seeking to get rid of suffering. Multitudes are seek- 
ing, however, dishonour, disgrace ; they are trying to get rid of 
care, not by casting it on the Lord, but by dodging the causes 
of it • they are trying to bid for honours — sons of Zebedee— 
men that are seeking power, glory, immortality in other ways 
than in the path Christ trod and as followers of Him, and are 
thus seeking their own woe and wail. We ought not to 
augment self, but we do ; we ought to abase it, but we exalt 
it ; we ought not to surround ourselves with others, making 
them serve us ; we are to serve others. There is a reciprocal 
relation in this regard — we are to serve, they are to serve ; we 
are interchanging services ; we are the slaves of love, and they 
are the slaves of love. A true Christian life is the intersphering 
of the self abasement of the low and the self-abasement of the 
high ; it is suffering for one another ; it is " Let every man 
please his neighbour to edification/' to up-building. The 
washing of feet is, I think, a part of the New Testament that 
many folks would like expunged. Men are quite willing to 
serve each other on the higher plane, where their service is a 
rebound of joy in themselves ; there are very few men willing 
to descend to the other end of human life and wash the feet — 
the lowest and most menial service of a slave. Yet that was 
what the Son of Man did ; and, " If I, your Lord and Master, 
have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's 
feet." There are a great many men who are fierce for the 
Trinity, fierce for the Atonement, fierce for all the interlocked 
doctrines, but they are not at all anxious about washing feet. 

And there is a relation in this subject to the training of 
children. We are seeking not to show our children how to 
bear bravely the troubles of life, but we are trying to bring 
them up so that the troubles of life shall not come near them. 
We love our children, and we should glory if we could only 
feel that they will attain to nobility, that the royal patent will 
one day lay upon them the garter or the robe or the sceptre, 
or what not. But according to the New Testament we are 
training them to bastardy ; we are not seeking to make our 
children enduring, industrious, energetic, self-sacrificing. What 



264 The Mystery of Suffering. 

was it that made the heroic men of days gone by ? Were they 
clothed in soft raiment ? Did they live in kings' houses ? Were 
they men that were made hardy by having wrapped themselves 
in furs so that the weather could not touch them ? They were 
men that came out of poverty ; they were men that came out 
of deep necessities and overcame them ; they were men against 
whom all nature and all society fought, and they overthrew 
them both ; they were the men that had hardship, and hard- 
ship made men of them. And when in wealth and honour 
they began to have springing up round about them their own 
children, they turned right round and cut their throats. "Oh, 
my children shall not have such trouble as I have had ! " It 
was the womb of your life — that is what made you. That 
which brings the beautiful statue out of the block of marble is 
not the shining of the sun on it. No Apollo, no modern 
hero ever came out of the solid stone by softness and by 
sweetness, but by the blow of the mallet and the chisel knock- 
ing offthe superincumbent stone, and letting out little by little 
the inside man. That is the only way God makes men now- 
adays. How many men there are that are hedging in their 
house, hedging in their children, surrounding them with all 
manner of appliances which, in connection with a higher and 
nobler treatment, may not be improper, because it is a greater 
thing for a man on whom has descended the power of 
popularity, the power of wealth, the power of station to be 
humble, for him to be a servant of all men — it serves as a 
more magnificent illustration than a man in a poorhouse can 
make known to men ■ these things may not in themselves be bad, 
but we are training our children directly for elevated places with- 
out training them in the way by which they shall be elevated. 
Every man is an egg, and he ought to hatch his real mankind 
out of himself. We ought to teach our children to be good 
soldiers, to be manly, to be courageous, to be content with the 
condition in which they are until they come by strife to lift 
themselves to a higher condition. Do not go and sit down at 
the topmost seat of the table lest he that is worthier shall 
come, and the master of the feast shall say : " What are you 
here for? Go down, go to the bottom." But the law of 
society is every man for himself, not "What am I fit for?" 
but "What can I grab? What can I get? Where can I 
climb ? '' The higher a man climbs the worse is his fall when 
he gets it. Society has in other indirect ways perverted the 



The Mystery of Suffering. 265 

ideal among men. Men are afraid to-day to be individual; 
they are afraid to speak till they have calculated what the 
effect of the speaking will be. Ministers are afraid to speak 
for a variety of reasons ; they do not know what will be the 
effect on the pew rents, they do not know what the effect 
will be on their standing among their brethren, they are afraid 
of the religious Press, they are afraid of public sentiment. 
People of God, are you not afraid of God at all ? The man 
that has asked leave of all creation before speaking ought not 
to speak then — he ought to hold his eternal tongue ; and yet 
how much cowardice is there : how much is lost, how much 
enterprise, how much freshness of thought ! God sent every 
man into the world who is a witness for the truth to be a 
witness in some respects as no other person is or can be. A 
minister is afraid to preach poor sermons, but I hold that a 
man who does not preach poor sermons will never be a good 
preacher. There would never be any mountains unless there 
were valleys between. That is an illustration only, but this is 
certain — that a man must be so himself commanded by the 
truth that he shall not be afraid to let himself out. You will 
never get sons of thunder in the pulpit until you get men 
that are willing to fail when fail they must. But now they 
study up, they polish, they organise, and smooth, and run 
their sermons into a mould of polite phraseology, and they 
address them to a cultivated audience, and they have distin- 
guished nobles come to hear them. John the Baptist was not 
a preacher of that sort, nor was Christ. " Woe unto you, 
Bethsaida ! Woe unto Chorazin ! '' and so on. No man is fit 
to preach until he is fit to be sacrificed. A man that gives 
himself up to the work of preaching is bound to say in his 
ordination thought : " I will make a life-sacrifice of myself if 
God means it and requires it ; but one thing I must do — I 
must be true to my own best thoughts, my own best beliefs, 
whether the Church likes it or not." Oh ! when the day shall 
come that there are more voiceless preachers — men who be- 
come holy, silent witnesses, mute preachers — the Church 
itself, exorcised of vanity, of fear, and of base aspiration, will 
be bettered, and the sufferings of these men will answer the 
great law of suffering, emancipation, elevation, glorification. 

I have but one more thought, and that is final — not alone in 
this sermon, but final in creation. No imagination can con- 
ceive the wonder, the rapture, the ecstasy, of the great hour 



266 The Mystery of Suffering. 

of finding out. When we have borne our body, borne our 
allotted suffering and pain, borne our obscurity and our perse- 
cution, borne all the troubles that go to the making of 
manhood in this life, unrecognised, not rated according to 
our moral value, rated according to the law of selfishness in 
human society ; when at last, emancipated the pauper from the 
poorhouse, the debtor from the prison, the broken-down man 
in business, who has been living on the crusts of his former 
prosperity, mothers, nurses, servants, whose souls were greater 
than their places ; when at last they shall come and stand in the 
light of the eternal heavens — oh, what a surprise, and oh, what 
a dismay, when these tumble from their heights of imagined 
greatness, when the first shall be last, and the last first ! But 
oh ! when the suffering is all gone, and we come to find our- 
selves, and come to find that the work of life, racking, filing, 
sawing in various violent ways upon us, has made us perfect, 
and we stand in the light of the other life, to see the meaning 
of all that has taken place in our obscure life — oh, what an 
hour of joy and of consolation ! O ye that are in low places, 
hope and look up ! O ye that are dishevelled in grief, look up 
to be patient ! O ye that sit in the shadow of death, your 
Deliverer is at hand ! The prison door will by-and-by be 
thrown open, and you will come out, and, going up, emerge 
into the glory of immortality. ^ The night is far spent, the day 
is at hand. Dearly beloved, many of you will go, almost I 
had said, before the month closes ; you will have touched the 
celestial heights, and know the secret of life. The morning 
star already shines in the East, and the Sun of Righteousness 
is rapidly pursuing behind. Children of light, children of God, 
take courage : look up ; go on ; your deliverance is at hand. 



PRAYERS. 



LORD, we lock with bashfulness and shame into Thy 
face, and yet Thine eye is pity rather than rebuke. 
Thou knowest how unworthy we are. Thou knowest, O Master 
of love, what ill-taught disciples, what sluggards we have 
been. We are sorry, we are deeply sorry; we will not that 
it should be so here. Oh ! give us some help. See how 
great our need is ; see how society dashes upon us. Lord, we 
struggle in the way, and, as with Thy servants of old that were 
sinking, put forth Thine hand, even if Thou dost rebuke us, 
and say, " Oh, ye of little faith ; '' lift us up and give us that 
we may walk upon the wave as if it were the solid rock, because 
Thou lovest us. We hardly know how to love ourselves ; 
there are days and hours in which we utterly reject ourselves ; 
but we are lifted up because Thou comest to us, saying, " Poor 
child, I love thee ; " and he whom Jesus loves may rise to his 
feet and rejoice. Now call us every day with the rising of the 
sun, call us Thine own, and with the setting of the sun call us 
Thine own ; and may men have no occasion to say, " To 
whom do you belong ? " in that all shall see that we belong to 
Jesus, and so we shall let our light shine that men, seeing our 
good works, shall glorify our God in heaven. Hear our prayer, 
and bless us for Thine own heart's sake. Amen. 

City Temple, July 4. 



THY words and promises are Yea and Amen ; Thou hast 
suffered none to be unfulfilled. We are witnesses our- 
selves of Thy great goodness. In looking back to our child- 
hood, in our household and in all our family life, Thou hast 



268 Prayers. 

been with us ; in the valley and shadow of death Thou hast 
called our children to Thee ; Thou hast given us the cup of 
bereavement ; Thou hast at times dashed out the light of the 
world, and yet afterwards we have had occasion to recognise 
Thy faithfulness and Thy goodness even in our suffering. We 
•are better for sorrow, and we look back on all the ways in which 
we have been led in the stormy scenes of life continually to 
recognise the invisible guide, the ever-present help, and we 
are what we are in all that is good by the grace of God. 
O Lord, we render to Thee thanksgiving for all Thy goodness, 
praise for all the revelations Thou hast made of Thyself, and 
with confessions of our unworthiness w r e still are emboldened 
to pray for more light and for great joy, and for the revelation 
within us of the truth of Jesus Christ. Grant unto us, we 
pray Thee, that fidelity that shall cling to Thee, not to Thy 
name, not to Thy church, but to Thee, the fountain of all that 
is just and pure, and true and tender, and loving and forgiving ; 
and grant that we may know how to partake of Thee as men 
of the loaf, that we may wear Thee, that we may put on the 
Lord Jesus Christ and be clothed in Him, and so may be 
established in the faith that hath no words, in all those truths 
that are unspeakable., in all those experiences that are full of 
peace, full of "joy unspeakable and full of glory." Bless this 
assembly. May Thy servant be guided to speak the right 
things and with the right spirit, and grant that the hours that 
we spend apart in the midst of outward tumult and the noises of 
the busy world may be hours as in the presence of the King, 
Keep us in life, and when we come to die may it seem to us 
as if the burst of joy had been for us as we rise through the 
untracked way which no mortal eye hath seen, convoyed by 
"Thine angels, and entering into our Father's home, where we 
will praise Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for ever. Amen. 



OH, drive away the clouds, O Thou that sittest behind the 
cloud ; justice and judgment are the habitations thereof, 
but love also triumphs, and cleanses the eye from misconcep- 
tion. Give to Thy servants, we pray Thee, a larger sense of 
how they may glorify God. Grant that they may learn at last 
that Jesus Christ set forth in a sweet and Godly life by them- 
selves is the Gospel that they can preach, and that no man can 
preach any more of the Gospel than he has living in himself. 



Prayers. 269 

Give to us all, King — we are very poor — give us riches. 
O Lord, we have found Thee, and we will not let Thee go. 
Speak some words to us from Thy love for us. May we not 
care so much what men do think ; may we be benefactors in 
Thy place. Pour out the light of joy, and hope, and patience 
in tribulation, pour out the victory of " Christ in us the hope 
of glory " upon men, that they, seeing what we are, may ask, 
" How shall I find Him who hath wrought these things in 
you ? " Bless thy servants that are aged, now treading on the 
border land, and send them up, we pray Thee, send them up 
with great joy, if not in a chariot of fire yet of joy, and may 
the cloak fall upon their children, and may they, too, become 
prophets. May the memory of sainted mothers, of venerated 
parents, work in us and for us, and may we hear Thee crying 
to every one of us, " The gate stands open : it is a time of 
hope, it is a time of forgiveness, it is a time for new life; come 
thou, come all." And may the bounty of Our Lord overflow 
in our hearts, not only on those that are present, but those that 
are absent. Sanctify life to us. Oh, make us patient. What 
if the path be thorny, it is but a little while. What if the flints- 
do cut ; it is but a short passage. May we climb. Oh, grant 
us power to fly up all the way ; may we fly to Thee, and cast 
our crowns at Thy feet, saying ; " Not unto us, not unto us, but 
unto Thy Name, Great Lover, be all the praise for ever and 
ever. Amen. City Temple, July 8. 



AGAIN, O our Lord, descend from heaven upon each of 
us. We are of the Spirit, and Thou art the Great 
Spirit : through our soul and innermost nature make Thyself 
know to us as Thou dost not to the world. Grant that we may 
have such evidence of Thy nearness and tenderness of love as- 
we have that summer has come when all the waves of heat and 
light do beat upon us. Grant that we may know that Thou 
art, and that Thou art the rewarder of those that diligently 
seek Thee. Accept the thanks and gratitude of our souls for 
all the wonderful way in which Thou hast led us in days gone 
by, and for all the hopes that cheer us under the burdens 
and troubles of life ! O give to us more and more the soul- 
sustaining consciousness that God is with us, and all things 



270 Frayers. 

shall work together for good, because we are called of God 
and have found Him and been found of Him, and love Him, 
and are beloved by Him. In Thee, as the strength of our 
faith, may we walk all the days of our lives, and be ready when 
the joyful message of time and the world shall come to us, 
"The Lord needeth thee, go up higher." And to Thee, 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shall be praise immortal. 
Amen. 

FOR all the past of our experience, we thank Thee, Lord. 
We are not contented. We behold how much of the 
land is yet to be possessed : the mountains are filled with 
Hivites and Hittites, thorns and briars are yet round about 
the fence ; the fruit is poor. O, Lord Jesus, still 
shine on; O, Sun of Righteousness, still keep summer at 
work upon us ; and for Thine own sake, and then for ours, 
bring us into that abundant grace of God in which every part 
of us praises Thee, and waits for the revelation and the glory 
when this body shall drop and our souls shall be with Thee. 
We are the sons of God. Lord, do not shut the door ; we do 
not stand outside, saying: "Lord, Lord, open unto us; we 
have eaten in Thy presence." We have leaned our heads on 
Thy bosom ; Thou canst not deny that. In days of sorrow 
we have clasped Thee ; we have felt Thine hand pierced ; we 
have laid our head against Thy wounded, speared side. Do 
not turn away from us : know us and lead us out of our 
sin and into Thine image ; and when we see Thee as Thou art 
we shall be like Thee, and praise Thee for ever and ever. 
Amen City Temple, July 15. 



WHEREFORE, O Father, hast Thou called us this 
morning if the door be shut? Behold, we stand 
waiting and calling, and if any are trembling reach forth Thy 
hand of mercy to lift them, that they may enter in and be at 
home. And all the household of faith welcome this morning, 
for we never had more need. Sometimes we are driven to 
Thee by stormy winds of trouble, but not to-day ; sometimes 
we come hungering and needing to be fed, but not to-day. We 
come with joy and gladness, and it is a benediction to look 



Prayers. 271 

upon Thee, to feel how near Thou art to us, for in Thee we 
live and move and have our being ; without Thee there is no 
sun, nor moon, nor harvest of the soul, and with Thee though 
the earth were barren we are rich, and strong, and most happy. 
We know that it is more blessed for Thee to give than to 
receive. Oh, what riches of benefaction, then, must needs 
flow from Thee ! Thou art infinite, outrunning all reach of 
thought and all experience of man. Giving doth not im- 
poverish Thee, nor withholding make Thee rich, and it is the 
music of Thy life, the joy of Thy soul, to give forth endlessly 
of all things partaking of Thee. All things that do fly, or 
swim, or walk are fed by Thy bounty ; all things that disport 
themselves in joy, little or much, all things that bear Thine 
image, and all that walk in the largeness of the endowments 
of the soul — all of them are day by day enfranchised, en- 
lightened, rendered joyful by the outpouring of Thine own 
love. And Thou knowest what the hours of secret joy have 
brought forth ; Thou knowest what has been the bridal of the 
soul, the marriage vow and covenant between Thee and us. 
Thou hast embraced our souls, and we stand in the ever- 
lasting covenant of Divine love, and nothing can pluck us 
from Thine hand. We are Thine now ; we shall be Thine to 
the very mortal hour, and to all eternity. With ever-blessed 
glory and joy Thou wilt make us Thine. We are overwhelmed 
to think that we can make God happy : even so, Lord, it is, 
for Thou hast said it, and we bring the little that we have, and 
offer to Thee the offering of our heart, of gratitude, of trust, 
and we would that it might be of loyalty and fidelity. But we 
are so weak, we are so forgetful ; so often it is the miasma of 
selfishness steaming up from our lives to blight the fairest 
flowers of our affection. But Thou knowest us, and when 
Thou didst receive us Thou knewest us altogether. Naked 
and open were we and are we before Thee, and therefore it is 
that Thou hast cheered us in the hours of discouragement. 
When our righteousness seems so poor and so threadbare, 
then it is that Thou art calling, "Come boldly to the throne 
of grace to obtain mercy and help in every time of need." Is 
it not a time of need to many here this morning ? Are 
there not some that are in grief, some in bereavement, 
some in bitterness of heart, some for their children, 
husbands for their wives, wives for their husbands ? Lord, 
Thou knowest what the discomfiture of life is, and how 



272 Prayers. 

great and manifold are the afflictions of Thy people. Be near 
them in this time of need. Are there not some that are con- 
scious of the great error of their way, some that have slipped 
and fallen, some that have wandered with the prodigal afar off, 
and are thinking of returning ? But oh, the greatness of the 
way ! It is a time of need. Draw near to them, and may 
every soul that would be better know that God is on his side. 
We beseech of Thee that those who are perplexed in life's 
endeavours, all that know not the way of duty, nor the way of 
prudence and safety, grant that they may hear coming to them 
to-day the voice of God saying in their souls : " This is the 
way ; walk ye in it." We pray that Thou wilt look upon those 
that are hungering and thirsting after righteousness — the 
yearnings and the longings of unsatisfied souls ; deepen in 
them the wells of salvation, that their waters may flow ever- 
more. Spread the table of Thy love before them that they 
may hunger no more, for Thou hast promised that they should 
be filled. And we beseech of Thee grant Thy blessing to Thy 
servant whom Thou hast set forth as the teacher of this people. 
Teach him, and may the Gospel of his own soul be as the 
interpretation of the Gospel of the letter ; may he go in and 
out before this people, whether in weakness or in strength, 
while serving the Lord with strength and with weakness — the 
Lord that loved him and bought him with His own precious 
blood. And be with all the officers and members of this 
church in all that Thou dost inspire them to do for the welfare 
of men, and for the honour and glory of their Redeemer. 
Grant that they may be strong and abundant in their per- 
formance. Let it not be done in a grudging spirit. May they 
know that the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, and may they 
rejoice in the Lord, and again may they rejoice. We pray that 
Thou wilt be near to all the churches of this great city, to all 
Thy servants that preach the Gospel, whether they preach it in 
truth or manifold error. Overrule the evil, and sanctify the 
good. Bring Thy people near to each other without murmur- 
ings and disputings. May all those that are called, or who call 
themselves by the name of Jesus Christ, dwell together in unity 
and mutual helpfulness. We pray that Thou wouldest take all 
stumbling blocks out of the way. And remember the nations 
of the earth. Be pleased to remember this great kingdom and 
empire, and Thy servant and handmaid, whom through so 
many years Thou hast sustained both in sorrow and in 



Prayers. 273 

rejoicing. Bless the Queen and all the Royal Household, 
the Heir Apparent, and his household, and the people 
related to them. And we beseech of Thee that Thou wouldest 
grant in the time of excitement, and in the time and striving 
of men together, that the stil small voice of God may be heard 
in the hearts of all that love Thee. Rule and overrule the 
councils of Thy people by the furtherance of Thine own pur- 
pose And we pray for the nations adjoining, and for all the 
nations of the earth. Lord, what aileth Thee, that Thou 
dost hide behind the cloud ? Dost Thou not hear the 
sighing of the captive ? Dost Thou not see the garments 
rolled in blood? Dost Thou not hear the thunder of the 
battle and the outcry of the weak and the spoiled ? Come 
forth, O Thou King of Salvation ! Roll back the darkness and 
the ignorance of men. Give growth to all, that they should 
be too strong for tyranny. May superstition perish with 
ignorance, and may the bright shining of intelligence bring 
with it love and gladness, and all the earth begin at last to 
march to the great call of God ; and as time passes on may 
the redeemed world, sweeping round and round Thy throne, 
join in the universal chant of glory to the Father and the Son 
and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

DEAR Lord, send home to us the simplicity of truth as 
it is in Jesus, and give us clearly to see how we are con- 
stantly misled; how we are baptizing by names of holiness 
things most unholy ; how we are seeking for a general form 
of sin and overlooking the real sins of e very-day life. Shine 
upon us with the summer of love ; shine and ripen us, that we 
may be full of righteousness. While we are in the garden of 
the Lord, let us not be weeds in the garden ; may we all be 
vines, and grant that we may bring forth more fruit. We ask 
it for Thy Name's sake. Amen. 

Westminster Chapel, July 18. 



WE have heard Thy call, our Father, and we have come 
here this morning to ask what Thou hast for us, for 
our needs are more than the hairs of our head — needs of the 
body, and of the heart, and of the understanding ; yet Thou 



274 Prayers. 

dost provide, and, according to Thine own sovereign pleasure, 
give to us, not the things which we ask, but the things which 
we need. Dear Lord, help us this morning to rise into the 
atmosphere of Thy life, to have all that is within us unlike 
Thee suppressed, all darkness, pride, wanderings, all dead- 
ness of the heart; and oh! to have everything that is 
like Thee rise up in us — rise up and acclaim Thee Lord 
and God. And may the service of the sanctuary be divinely 
guided, and may the fruit thereof appear in our thought, in 
our will, in our conduct, and in all our life ; and so guide us 
as that Thou shalt be pleased with us and with our imperfect 
attempt at worship. We ask it through the name of our Be- 
loved, to whom, with the Father and with the Spirit, shall be 
praise evermore. Amen. 



LORD, help us. We are broken down in the sight of Thy 
love and in the wonder of Thy grace. Being Thyself 
pure, Thou art the friend of the impure ; being Thyself sin- 
less, Thou art the best friend of those that are covered with 
transgression ; being Thyself full of resources of happiness in 
Thyself and in Thy kingdom above, Thou hast everywhere 
given forth Thyself to those that sit in darkness, to those that 
are in the region of the Shadow of Death, and hast made 
Thyself the life of the universe. From Thee are issuing 
streams of life and help to every creature ; to all that are in 
the sea, to all that are in the air, to all that are upon the land ; 
the cattle upon a thousand hills are Thine ; all things are 
Thine. But yet more graciously Thou art giving Thy life forth 
to us, made in Thy image, but disfigured • to us that wander, 
that stumble, that turn even and go away from Thee backward, 
to us that deserve the least. All creatures beside us follow the 
law of their being, and neither turn to the right nor to the left, 
and are without sin ; but man, endowed more richly than all, 
chief is he of those that break Thy law, that destroy their own 
happiness, that fill the neighbourhood with sorrow. Selfish- 
ness and pride and cruelty have their home in the hearts of 
men ; and yet, patient and gentle Saviour, Thou givest Thy- 
self for them. Not alone is there a memory of Thy gracious- 
ness upon earth, but now and everywhere and always Thy life 
is poured forth for the sustenance, the exaltation, and the 
salvation of those that deserve nothing but penalty and sorrow 



Prayers. 275 

and suffering. Thou Infinite Love, shine upon us this morning. 
When we think of Thy great excellence over against our 
meanness and wickedness we first hang our heads in shame 
and would shrink away from Thy presence ; and then, caught 
by the better influence of Thy Spirit, we lift ourselves up in 
admiration and adoration for our God that stands over against 
the storm of righteous justice and indignation, not as thunder 
and lightning within it, but as the bow of peace that is spanned 
upon it. Thou Redeeming Heart, Thou Glory of love, Thou 
Hope of the soul, how shall we compass Thee with our 
thought ? We sit down in Thy presence with despair ; there is 
nothing like Thee among men ; nowhere can we find symbols 
and types of the grandeur of Thy nature, nowhere of the 
tenderness of Thy love, nowhere of the comprehensiveness of 
Thy providence, nowhere of the ambition of Thy government. 
Save with an everlasting salvation those that are in transgres- 
sion and in sin. We praise Thee, and we praise Thee with 
the praise of love ; we trust ourselves into Thy hand ; do for us 
what is necessary ; hear us not according to our cry, for we are 
short-sighted and know not what is best. We seek to avoid 
pain ; if it be needful, give it to us. We strive to avoid bereave- 
ment ; if it be needful, take, though it be the eye or the 
hand. We strive to build ourselves up ; if it be needful, 
humble us to the very ground. Give what we do not want, 
keep back what we do want. Oh ! think for us, and plan for 
us, and guide us in the way which is best in Thy sight ; and 
year after year, whatever may befall us outwardly, may the hope 
of salvation through Jesus Christ grow stronger and stronger ; 
may the sky of our hope be without sunset ; may we believe, 
as the days go on, that we are drawing near to the eternal 
summer. Grant unto us that love for Jesus and that experience 
of the Spirit of God working mightily in us that shall overcome 
fear. Grant that this may be our faith : " God loves us, and 
who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus ? " 
May this be the anchor of hope within the veil, holding stead- 
fast ; though the winds do blow and the storms beat, yet in the 
midst of storm and violence holding steadfast to the end. 
Bless this congregation and all the households that are repre- 
sented here to-day. Remember the little children, and be 
gracious to them. Remember those that are fountains of 
of tears because they are not, and comfort them. Remember 
the bereaved hearts torn asunder ; may they be able to say and 



276 Prayers. 

to feel," The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away." Bless those 
that are in the sense of guilt filled with remorse, and comfort 
them, and say to every one, " Peace be unto you ; come unto 
Me ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest." Thou hast fulfilled it a thousand times to us ; fulfil it 
to-day to every waiting heart, and grant, we beseech of Thee, 
O Lord, that the members gathered together in this holy com- 
munion and bond of church fellowship may more and more grow 
into the image of Jesus ; may Thy servant be strengthened in 
body, and yet more mightily in soul, to lead men from darkness 
and from sin along the shining way to light and holiness. And 
grant that we may see the joy of Thy salvation in the conver- 
sion of men and in the edification of Thy servants. And bless 
all the congregations that gather together in the city to-day. 
Though outwardly disunited, and oftentimes warring, Thou 
art the God of all, and in Thy soul there is unity and com- 
passion. Grant that it may be diffused to every one every- 
where. Be pleased to remember the Sovereign of this great 
realm ; and as Thou hast given her strength and endurance 
through a long life to do the things that are just and pure, so 
continue Thy bountiful benefaction to the end of this weary 
and mortal life. And remember her household and all the 
Royal families, and grant to them grace, mercy, and peace. 
May this great realm by which Thou hast served Thyself in 
days gone by, the fruitful parent of a great household — grant 
that it may stand before Thee, and that all its troubles may be 
composed in the wisdom of God, and that its life and strength 
may yet go forth for the healing of the nations. We beseech 
of Thee to remember all the nations of the world Lord, hast 
Thou forgotten? Why do men strive against each other? 
Why is the sound of battle yet rolling through the air ? When 
wilt Thou put down ignorance and superstition and all 
despotism and cruelty ? When wilt Thou give the light of 
knowledge to mankind ? When shall the angel be permitted 
to fly through the heavens declaring that the kingdoms of this 
world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ ? Lord Jesus, come ; delay not ; the whole earth 
doth wait for Thee, groaning and travailing in pain until now. 
Come, Thou desired of the ages — Thou whom our hearts desire, 
come ; even so Lord Jesus, come quickly ; and to Thee, with 
the Father and the Spirit, shall be praise evermore. Amen. 
Westbourne Park Chapel, July 25. 



Prayers. 277 

BEHOLD us, our Father, this morning, for Thou hast 
called us higher, and what hast Thou for us ? We are 
needy and Thou art rich, and giving doth not impoverish Thee 
nor withholding make Thee rich. Cleanse, then, by Divine 
touch our eyes that we may see spiritual things ; give food to 
our hungry hearts that have sought food and found it bitter, 
that have drunk at broken cisterns and our thirst has not been 
quenched. Give to us that bread of which he that eateth 
shall know hunger no more. Give to us spiritual life ; give 
Thyself, for we are Thy children, and are beloved of Thee. 
Oh, give the flame back to us kindled in Thy nature, that we 
may love God, and love His servants, and love one another, 
and may this day be a day at home to the soul, and may the 
service be edifying to all that are gathered together. We ask 
it in the name of the Beloved. Amen. 

Liverpool, August 15. 



WE thank Thee our Father for this day of rest; and 
through these vapours may we behold the eternal 
atmosphere bright, clear, radiant with Divine wisdom and 
Divine love ; and may there be something in every heart to- 
day that shall call out for God, not as the Creator, not as the 
sustainer of the world, but may every heart call out for Thee 
as a child calls for its father : for Thou art our Father ; Thou 
art to us more than father or mother. We are borne up in 
Thy arms with all mercy sustaining us by day and by night, 
not in the moment of supplication but ever more. Conscious 
or unconscious we live in the whole atmosphere of Thy care 
and Thy kindness. Thou never forgettest, Thou never dost 
draw back from Thy word of love. We are known to Thee ; 
we have not imposed upon Thee. Thou hast not promised 
Thy goodness to us on condition of our goodness. Thou hast 
sought in us vessels into which Thou shouldest pour Thine 
own self; and out of the fulness of Thy exhaustless nature 
Thou art pouring evermore Thy thoughts of love and kind- 
ness. What if we are sinners ? How much more art Thou 
righteous ! What if we are filled with broken resolutions and 
promises broken? Over against our weakness stands the 
mighty mercy of God, and Thy grandeur is made known to us 



278 Prayers. 

in part by our insignificance. For Thou dost forgive our trans- 
gressions, and in our repentance we derive the benefit of Thy 
forgiveness. Thou art making Thyself near and nearer to us 
not according to the measure of our righteousness, but accord- 
ing to the measure of Thine own generosity and the grandeur 
of Thine own love. We would think of the way in which the 
Lord has lead us, and when we have rehearsed Thy mercies, 
and told them over and over again, in our childhood, on our 
way up to manhood, the sparing mercies, the recovering 
mercies of God, all the fountains that Thou hast in the 
wilderness and in the populous places of life, when we think 
of all the benefit and privilege, still our thoughts are as 
nothing ; Thy mercies transcend all enumeration. Thy 
thoughts of goodness to us how precious they are ! The 
thought of God, the love of God, with all its power and 
purity and endurance, clothe us as with garments. Grant, 
then, that we may have faith to discern these great truths 
that hang above our heads ; and to-day may we hear them 
enunciated as by joy bells from afar. How many there are 
that have known us and are gone. How many there are that 
taught us in our earlier life whose voice we shall hear no more. 
How many there are that we have held in our arms and loved, 
that like the birds flew early away. Our father, our mother, 
our brothers and sisters, and our dear little children are with 
Thee, and to-day our thoughts are with Thee, and we wander 
up and down to know where they are, and to discern their 
faces which now can never again be discerned, for they are 
clothed in beauty unknown to earth, and all that was dear to 
us in outward guise is swallowed up in the beauty and glory of 
immortality. And yet they are ours ! they love us more than 
we love them, and yearn for us when the day of our emanci- 
pation shall come. Oh, dear friends, we are coming. The morn- 
ing is dawning and the daylight is at hand, and life and love 
and joy forever. Grant that to-day we may stop at the springs 
of salvation and refresh ourselves. Grant that we may now 
take hold by faith upon all the promises of God. Grant that 
we may have faith to discern the invisible, the multitudes of 
those that are ransomed and redeemed, and the voices of the 
great heavenly host. And before we depart from the body 
may we enter into the rest of the soul and feel the sweet in- 
fluence and incense of heavenly life descending upon us. Bless 
the members of this congregation. In all the households repre- 



Prayers. 279 

sented here dwell Thou. Be gracious to the little children ; 
inspire them with truth and love and loyalty to God and man. 
And grant that those that rear them may themselves be ever- 
more taught of God, and may they live the truths of the 
Gospel which they teach in the letter to their children. If there 
be sorrow and darkness in any dwelling, strike through the dim 
and twilight experience and may Thy joy quench their sorrows, 
and may their faith pierce behind the belt of cloud that for 
only the hour surrounds them. If there be those on whom 
Thy hand has been laid heavily, who sit in darkness, Thou 
canst lift them up ; there is no night with Thee, nor darkness. 
Draw them up by Thy gracious power into Thine own light 
and hold them a little while in Thy bosom. Even as a mother 
quieteth her child so quiet those that sit in their great sorrow 
and are darkened thereby. Draw near to those that are in 
perplexity and doubt as to the way of duty and as to t he way 
of escape. Especially be near to those that have transgressed 
and are in trouble and sorrow for their own sin. May they not 
look down nor within, but away from their stumbling selves and 
from their transgression, and may they look up to the great 
heart of forgiveness and hear Thee say to them, ''Arise and go 
on,'' and may they redeem themselves from the past, not by 
brooding over it but by leaving it behind them with their faces 
heavenward, with new inspired purpose of serving God. And 
we pray that Thou wouldst look upon all wants of every kind. 
Every heart knoweth its own difficulty; everyone knows its 
own need ; Thou more than any one knowest. We pray that 
Thou wouldst bless all the officers and rulers and members of 
this church in their several degrees and duties ; and may Thy 
word that is sown here bring forth abundantly to the glory of 
God. May Thy servant the pastor feed not alone the sheep 
but the lambs of the flock. May his bodily strength be 
augmented ; may his mind be continually refreshed by inter- 
course with God. And we pray that he may see that the Word 
prospers in his administration, and may this church grow in 
strength in all heavenly resemblance in all things that shall win 
men to the love of God, to the beauty of holiness. We pray 
for Thy blessing to rest upon this kingdom, upon Thine hand- 
maid the Queen and upon all her household. We pray that 
Thou wouldst counsel her counsellors, and that Thy grace 
may be their providence. We pray that Thou wouldst look 
upon the outspread peoples of this land that now wander in all 



280 Prayers. 

the world, and [upon all those that are joined with them in 
lineage, in language, in knowledge, and in national inspiration. 
Bring together Thy dispersed ones, if not in body yet in pur- 
pose. Hast Thou not planted us that we might obtain the later- 
day glory of God ? Hast Thou not brought this great people 
through the wilderness to the promised land of light and liberty 
and purity and justice and love ? Fulfil Thy promise, and 
speedily come ; and let the nations that sit in darkness behold 
the light that has risen and is rising ; and let at last the joy 
day come when through all the heavens and throughout the 
earth the voice shall be heard proclaiming the accomplished 
victory, and when the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
Christ shall be established everywhere ; and to Thy adorable 
name, Father, Son, and Spirit, shall be the praise evermore. 
Amen. 



GRANT Thy blessing to rest upon us ; for as the flower 
cannot blossom except the sun do shine upon it — 
whatever beauty is in it withers, so neither can we. Even 
when we come to the bud and the blossom we need to be 
unfolded by the bright, shining, and sweet influence of the Sun 
of righteousness. Lord Jesus shine with Thy love upon us, 
upon Thy servant the pastor, upon all those that bear rule 
with him, upon the members of this church, upon all those 
that are in affliction, upon all those that are in prosperity 
and enjoyment, upon the aged, upon the young. And may 
we all rejoice with exceeding great joy that we are drawing 
near to our glorification and that we wait expectant for the 
voice that cries, " Go forth to meet Him.'' And when that 
hour of release shall come to us may there be oil in our 
lamps ; may we not delay and lose His presence, but go 
forth with joy everlasting. And to the Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit shall be the praise. Amen. 

Edinburgh, Septe?nber 5. 



DEAR LORD, Thou knowest us altogether ; that is our 
hope. We shall never deceive Thee. When Thou didst 
breathe peace to our souls we were not better than we seemed 
to be. Whe.i we are mortified and discouraged because we 



Prayers. 281 

promised and broke the promise, Thou knowest us from the 
beginning, and Thou art still saying, " I love thee, I suffer 
with thee, and for thee, and I will make thee whole by faith 
in Me, trust Me and live." Dear Lord, we will trust Thee, 
even if we stagger often and fall down we will trust Thee. As 
Thou didst seek out him that was cast out of the synagogue,, 
so Thou wilt find us, those that for truth's sake suffer, on whom 
a ban is put. Thou wilt have mercy on those that live in the 
sun of popularity, but Thou wilt shine yet with sweeter beams 
upon those who for confession of Christ are suffering all 
things. Now teach us the grand life of love, prepare us to go 
up, but let us not go till we can speak its language ; prepare 
us to go dp hearing afar off the chant, the anthem of love. 
With feeble murmuring voice we call to Thee, " We are 
coming." We hear Thee shout from the battlements, " Come, 
come, come all, and take of the water and live freely." 
Parched and thirsty, and scarcely articulating, we say " Lord* 
we are coming." Our children come and meet us, our vener- 
able parents are there, the gates are flung open, the great 
procession pours forth ; we have an exceeding abundant 
entrance ministered unto us as we come to the kingdom of 
love, and when we shall enter in and behold Thee for the 
moment we shall forget all other things to cast ourselves down 
in Thy presence, to love Thee and adore Thee, and as the 
sun gives all the beauty that there is in flower and tree, or 
earth or sky, so it shall be Thyself that shall give the love, the 
fatherhood, the motherhood, the brotherhood, the childhood 
— everything, more beautiful because it will shine in the 
radiance of Thy love. Prepare us, O Lord, forget us not, and 
let us not forget Thee. And to Thy name shall be the praise. 
Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen. 

Scarborough, September 12. 



ALMIGHTY GOD, we thank Thee that in Thine infinite 
power and glory Thou rememberest us, and dost conde- 
scend to us. More than the mother for the little child dost 
Thou care for us by name, each one. Our sorrow, our sad- 
ness, our burden, our life, is all before Thee. " Naked and 
open are we before Him with whom we have to do." We 
rejoice in Thy fidelity, for Thy love to us is over all things. 



282 Ptayers. 

And it forgets not to chastise. " Whom the Lord loveth He 
chastiseth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." Let 
us not wander in pleasant and wicked ways for want of 
chastisement, pain, and punishment ; Lord, forget them not ; 
but for peace and gladness, for mercy and radiance, also 
bethink Thee. And as they that wake in summer know that 
summer is come, so may the joys that sing in our thoughts to- 
day, may all the sweet peace and the fragrance as the flowers 
in the Lord's garden be with us this morning, to tell us that it 
is one of the days of the Son of Man, one of the days for our 
own souls ; and may we rejoice in seeing each other in the 
right hand of fellowship, in all interest and sympathy each 
with the other. May we rejoice in worshipping Thee ; if we 
cannot in the beauty of holiness, yet with the aspiration for 
holiness. And grant that the service of the morning and of 
this day may be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, our Re- 
deemer. Amen 



THOU fountain of light and joy, scatter our darkness, and 
put away our night, and call to us that the morning of 
hope has dawned upon us, and let it be a morning of joy. 
We are unworthy of it; but never have we claimed to be 
worthy. We know how feeble we are; every day proves to 
us our ignorance, and if only by our own holiness we have hope 
of heaven and rest, we are in despair at once, for we are 
altogether out of the way, except in the few things in which 
we have by Thy dear Spirit been brought back to the 
Shepherd and Bishop of our souls. We thank Thee, Lord, 
that we may believe that we are being drawn upward by Thy 
universal Spirit, the light of the love of God. Thou art our 
Sun. Without the sun all things in nature do perish ; it is 
the father of all beauty, and growth, and life ; Thou art 
Father of all beauty and growth in us. We thank Thee that 
Thou hast made Thyself known to us in such easy ways. 
The voice of nature hath nothing in it but what we could un- 
derstand ; but when we hear Thy Son and our dear Saviour 
calling unto us— " Come unto Me, and ye shall find rest," then 
we rejoice, we make haste to believe that it is the voice of 
God. It is to us the voice of assurance, and we learn to 
follow it. Even as the sheep follow the shepherd, so we Thy 
monitions. Now, Lord, this morning we do not come to con- 



Prayers. 283 

fess our sins ; we need not, they are naked and open before 
Thee. We know them ; though we may not appreciate the 
wickedness and the ingratitude and the selfishness, yet we 
know ourselves to be so full of frailty and of transgression that 
we need not make known anything to Thee ; but we hear 
Thee standing over against our acknowledged iniquity, saying, 
" Come boldly to the Throne of Grace to obtain mercy and 
help in time of need." Dear Lord, Thou art not deceived, 
though we may be. When Thou didst take us Thou wert not 
deceived, and didst not believe that we should ever be better 
than we have been. With the foreknowledge of our weakness, 
and waywardness and obstinacy, Thou still didst take us, 
Thou didst know what the task was, and Thou didst willingly 
assume it, and we are in Thine arms. As babes whose 
mothers know that they know but little, and are weak, and 
feeble, and ignorant, and must needs be patiently dealt with 
through long months, and years ; so dost Thou take us, and 
so art Thou dealing with us. We need never be discouraged 
in Thy presence, thinking how many times we have promised 
and have broken, how many times we have resolved and 
failed, how many temptations have insidiously made our feet 
to slide into dark and forbidden ways. Thou knewest it 
from the beginning, and Thou hast known it all the way, 
and Thou art still saying to us, " Come and obtain mercy, 
and help in time of need." Dear Lord, this is the very 
time we need Thee ; to-day we need Thee ; now we need 
our souls to dwell in Thine, and to have our wills sub- 
dued to Thy will, and our aspirations purified, and all the pur- 
poses of our life like the purposes of Thine own life. As yet 
we are with the animal kind, with our faces prone to the 
earth, and feeding on vain pastures here. Oh, give to us 
the bread that cometh from above ; give to our souls that joy 
which the world cannot give, and that peace which it cannot 
take away. Thou art the bread of life, may we feed upon 
Thee, not as bodily food, but as the soul feeds without wasting 
that upon which it feeds. No man shall hunger again, after he 
has had the bread of life, as the body hungers. Give to us 
Thyself. O, Love Eternal, work in us the dispositions of 
love ; give to us that quiet spirit which Thou holdest in Thyself, 
and for Thyself, and for all Thy children. Look upon the 
various wants of those in Thy presence, the aged, those that 
stagger with the duties of mid-life, and the young. Remember 



284 Prayers. 

those that do not remember Thee, and by Thy goodness and 
Thy mercy lead them into a better way. Remember all those 
that are standing under conscious sorrows that seem to be 
greater than they can bear. Thou that didst bear the Cross, 
teach them to bear it ; Thou that wert strengthened by the 
angels in Thine anguish, teach them that Thine angels are 
ministering spirits for them. Are there any whose hearts are 
full because the cradle is empty ? Look upon them, thou 
Consoler, subdue their anguish, give them rest and trust in 
Thee. Are there those present that seemed disbranched, whose 
bereavements have taken from them counsel and counsellor, 
friend, and brother? Walk Thou in the midst of them, and 
if, like Thine handmaid of old, they cannot discern that it is 
Jesus by reason of the tears that are in their eyes, call them 
by their name, and let them know that Thou art very near at 
hand for their comfort and for their strength. Remember all 
the households that are here represented by Thy servants ; 
breathe into every one of them the spirit of hope, and love, 
and joy. Grant, we beseech of Thee, that the atmosphere 
may be as that of heaven. Remember especially the dear 
little children. When upon earth Thou didst call them to 
Thee, Thou didst take them up into Thy lap, and didst lay 
Thine hands on their head and bless them ; with the infinite 
caresses of tenderest love still call them, still lay Thine hands 
on them, still may they grow up unto all truth and fidelity and 
divine love. Grant Thy blessing to rest upon the place where 
we are ; grant that all those who are resorting here for errands 
of mercy may learn of Thee. May all the households be 
blessed. Bless the Church. They are one or they are 
nothing before Thee. Let the divisions that separate them on 
earth pass away. Grant [that men may seek not the things in 
which they differ, nor sit not as judges one over against the 
other, but in the spirit of the equality of divine love, may 
they sit as dear children in the presence of God, and so may 
they be more and more perfectly in sympathy and unity for 
their common work of destroying evil, and bringing forth the 
pleasant fruits of righteousness. Remember this land, the 
land of our fathers, the land in which Thou hast done great 
things in days gone by. Remember, we beseech of Thee, the 
Queen and all that are joined with her in authority, and as 
Thou hast given her many years of prosperous reign, so unto 
the end continue Thy benignity, that her counsellors may be 



Prayers. 285 

the counsellors of righteousness, and that this great people in 
all their relations through all the earth may be a people of God, 
loving justice and peace, and seeking the prosperity of man- 
kind. We beseech of Thee to remember the nations of 
Europe, in their sad and tormented conditions, in war, 
and revolution, and agitation ; O, Thou that didst quell the 
storm, see that there come at last calm to them. And remem- 
ber the land across the sea, which our fathers founded ; grant, 
we beseech of Thee, that it may become an example of justice 
and of truth, and of divine fidelity to all the nations of the 
earth ; lead them away from war, from avarice, from oppres- 
sion, and make them to all nations of the earth, not simply a 
people that love liberty and religion, but a people that interpret 
religion and make it to be love. Let Thy kingdom come 
everywhere in all the earth, fill the world with Thy glory, and 
to the Father, Son, and Spirit, shall be praise evermore. 
Amen. 



ACCEPT our service this morning ; forgive the imperfect 
utterance of Thy servant ; grant that every heart may 
be opened to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Grant 
that men may not look for Thy kingdom, saying : " Lo, here, 
and lo, there," that they may not look to this church and to 
that church, to this denomination and to that denomination. 
May there spring out of the hearts of Thy called, Thine own 
elect, such an atmosphere, such a beauty of holiness, that men 
shall not desire to contradict the truth as it is in Christ, but 
shall come saying, ' ' Teach us the way, teach us this lesson of 
happiness." Dear Lord, how long wilt Thou wait? how long 
shall the whole creation "groan, and travail in pain until 
now " ? When wilt Thou take Thy great power and come to 
reign? The whole earth doth wait for Thee. "Even so, 
come, Lord Jesus, come quickly," and to Thy great name, 
with the Father and the Spirit, shall be praise evermore. 
Amen. Torquay ^ September 19. 



THOU that didst command the light to shine out of dark- 
ness, let the light of Thy countenance shine into our 
darkness. Bring forth in us not that which is of the flesh, 
but that which is of the spirit, that which calls for Thee and 



286 Prayers. 

cries in us Abba, Father. May we take held this morning 
upon Thee ; may we embrace Thee ; may we love Thee \ and 
may love overcome all fear and drive away everything that 
shall prevent our coming boldly to the throne of grace to 
obtain mercy and help in time of need. Dear Lord, what 
time is there that is not needing ? In Thee we live and move 
and have our being, yet are assaulted on every side to move 
us away from our steadfastness and our faith, and to substitute 
the things which are seen for the things unseen and eternal. 
We need the inspiration of the Divine Spirit every day that 
we may discern the things that are true as against the things 
which are visible. So grant unto us this morning that we 
may find ourselves in sweet accord with Thee, not because we 
are good, but because we are needy, — not because we have 
rendered any service, but because all service of God is ours ; 
so grant unto us the fulness of faith and trust, and hope and 
joy and believing, and may the service of the morning be not 
transient as the dew, but may it abide as the rain, and grant 
that it may spring up in all fruit and blessedness and beauty 
as the flowers in the garden of the Lord. We ask it for Christ's 
sake. Amen. 



VERILY, the lines have fallen to us in pleasant places. 
We are born in these later days, and the light and the 
glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ hath 
brought delight to us. Since we were children we have been 
brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord ; we 
have learned much and are learning still, and yet the lessons 
of life are not learned. We are seeking for joy and running 
away from sorrow ; we are praying for grace, and are unwilling 
to accept the answer to our prayers in the Lord's appointed 
way. We are making ourselves rich in this world, but poor in 
spiritual things. We are filled with zeal, with ambition, with 
love and desire of pleasure, with riches, with the praise of 
men : we are living to search out the things that the senses can 
behold; but the unsearchable riches of the invisible world,, 
how far are they from us, and how little do we seek them \ 
We walk with Christ among men, we praise Him in the 
cathedral and in the church, we praise Him in words and 
psalms and hymns ; but do we praise Thee in our weakness, 
in our suffering, in our temptation ? We are looking for men's 



Prayers. 287 

respect ; are we looking for Thine ? O Lord our God, Thou 
Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, intimately ac- 
quainted, do we walk with Thee ? Do we suffer gladly for 
Thee, and with Thee ? Do we remember day by day that if 
we suffer with Him, we shall reign with Him ? Deliver us, we 
beseech of Thee, from the bondage of our senses : deliver us 
from the heresy that misleads us continually, not of thought, 
nor of doctrine, but of lite. Give to us, we pray Thee, all 
the purging influence of Thy spirit, and awaken in us the con- 
sciousness that we are the sons of God ; and that it doth not 
yet appear what we shall be when glorified. Oh, grant that 
we may discern what nobility there is in walking as the sons of 
God, and suffering whatever is needful to give emancipation 
to our faith and to our spirits. We ask not for happiness, we 
ask not for joy, and yet they are ours. We ask not that we 
may be prospered in life and in health ; we ask that Thy will 
may be done. If some of us are appointed to obscurity may 
we rejoice in that ; and if some of us are cast down dis- 
appointed may we learn to rejoice in that ; and if we are sick 
or feeble may we learn to rejoice in that. In all things may 
we learn to be content, whether to abound or to suffer lack ? 
that we may in every place, exalted or humble, wherever we 
are, be the faithful soldiers of Jesus Christ, and show to 
men Christ in every phase of our own lives. Oh, that we 
could dwell upon the mountain of vision ! for to us Thou art 
altogether lovely, and there are no joys like the inspiration of 
the joy which we have when we are in the mind of Christ, and 
when Thou dost reveal to us somewhat of the eternal world 1 
then we are lifted up, then angels lift us up lest we dash our 
feet against a stone ; and there are hours of glory, luminous 
beyond the shining of the sun, in which we discern Thee and 
eternal things. Destiny, son-ship — all things are ours, and we 
are Christ's, and Christ is God's. O Lord, that we might 
abide in these beatitudes ! Thy servant of old would fain 
remain in the Tabernacle built upon the Mount of Trans- 
figuration whilst sin racked the world and drove men hither 
and thither below. Oh, grant, we beseech of Thee, that while 
we are with Christ, in search of luminous hours with Him, we 
may go down where darkness is and temptation and sorrow 
and sin, and be content to follow our Master in His humilia- 
tion as well as in His glorification. For in some dark hours 
we are overmastered of temptation ; we doubt because we 



288 Prayers. 

cannot see, and all our zeal is quenched and lies as plants 
overcome of the frost. O Lord, then Thou art blotted out 
and then we are as beasts that perish. Then in our darkness 
and trouble Thou comest to us in all sweetness and gentleness 
and Thou dost teach us again, and we cry, " Who art Thou, 
Lord?'' and Thou dost reveal Thyself to us gracious, long- 
suffering, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. And art 
Thou to be for ever thus ? Shall we go on to sin that grace 
may abound ? Thou, O Lord, art a Saviour ; not at death, 
but all the way through life Thou art saving us from our 
sins, our inconstancy, ingratitude, and selfishness. Still 
save everlastingly. And we beseech Thee draw near to us 
this morning — to this waiting congregation, not to give them 
the things they ask for, for they know not how to ask as they 
should. Blessed be Thy name that our prayers are not 
answered. Long ago we should have been blighted if Thou 
hadst heard us and answered us according to our unwisdom. 
According to Thy great .goodness treat us as we treat our 
children, knowing what is best and refusing them that which 
they solicit with tears even, if it be harmful. So give us the 
things needed, and every day give us this patient waiting 
upon God, this strength in the Lord, and may we walk, 
whether in high places or in low, with Thee. Be our com- 
panion, our merciful High Priest — Thou that hast been 
■** tempted in all points as we are yet without sin." Oh, let us 
hear Thee calling us to Thee, and saying, " Come boldly," for 
Thou knowest us altogether. And it is with this knowledge of our 
weakness, folly and sinfulness that Thou art calling. Oh, 
Physician of the soul, because we are sick Thou art near us, 
and helpful to us. Now enter into every heart and every 
household represented here, and may they know that the Lord 
has come by the light that shall stream through the dwelling, 
and through their own souls. We pray that when Thou hast 
tempted them and carried them through needed troubles, 
when Thou hast in Thy providence shewn them and taught 
them, " as good soldiers, to bear hardship," when Thou hast 
answered Thy purpose in them \ oh, bring them forth into 
freedom and into peace — the peace which passeth all under- 
standing. Bless, we pray Thee, parents that they may be faith- 
ful to God in the care of their children. And bless the little 
children, bless them, our Saviour, as Thou didst upon earth ; 
take them into Thine arms, lay Thine hands upon them, and 



Prayers. 289 

bless them with a sweet and infinite caress of Divine love. 
Grant Thy blessing to rest upon all those that are appointed 
to responsible places, upon all that teach, may they be taught : 
upon Thy ministering servants that open the invisible world — 
may they discern it themselves. May Thy servants that are 
appointed to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ be themselves 
a Gospel, may Christ be so formed in them that they shall be 
able to preach themselves the Christ that is in them, the 
Christ that hath made their life His life and His life their life. 
We pray that they may never be discouraged. May they sow 
in weakness that by-and-by they may reap in strength. We 
pray for Thy blessing to rest upon all the churches of every 
name in this place. Let divisions cease, let the daylight of 
love dawn. Oh, grant that Thy people the world over may 
begin to see eye to eye and heart responsive to heart. Let 
the kingdom of love so long delayed and lingering — oh, let it 
dawn and shine brighter and brighter unto the perfect day — 
and to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shall be praise for 
evermore. Amen. 

GIVE to us the Holy Spirit of enlightenment ; give to us 
the river of love ; give us to understand what are the 
things that are best, and to be content with the things that are 
best, though they crucify the flesh. Grant, we pray Thee, 
that we may not listen to the voice of the world, charm it 
never so cunningly. May that still small voice of God, 
through our conscience and through our faith, be heard 
saying, in sorrow, in trouble, in weakness, in persecution, in 
afflictions manifold, " This is the way, walk ye in it." Dear 
Lord, walk by us. We are as Thy servant of old, who came 
to Thee, walking on the sea, and, beginning to sink, cried out. 
We are as he that besought Thy mercy upon his son, and said, 
" Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." So, Lord, we trust Thee ; 
oh ! help our untrust and distrust, and if Thou lovest us, and 
Thou dost love us, then be faithful to us, and teach us in 
affliction to be faithful to Thee, and as the night reveals the 
stars, so through our sorrow and darkness may all the glory 
of the firmament be made to appear above our heads until the 
day star arise ; yea, until the sun and moon wax no more ; but 
God shall be the light and the hope of the hopeless soul, and 
to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shall be praises evermore. 
Amen. Brighton, September 26. 



290 Pi'ayers. 

BY what name shall we speak of Thee ? Dear Lord, we 
would call Thee Our Father. Yea, Thou art our 
Father and our Mother, for all the sweetness of motherhood, 
and all the strength and vigour of fatherhood, are in Thee. 
Father and mother sprang from Thee ; they were part of Thy 
nature, struck off from Thy soul. Thou art the everlasting 
Father of every one of us, and we are Thy children, though 
we may not know it, nor improve our privilege. Why should 
we tell Thee that we are weak ? Dost Thou not know it, who 
hast carried us in Thy hand ? Why should we tell Thee that 
we are full of ignorance ? dost Thou not perfectly know that ? 
Why should we that have stumbled tell Thou that hast lifted us 
up ? Why should we go mourning before Thee every day 
when the Lord knoweth us altogether ? " Naked and open are 
we before Him with whom we have to do.'' And knowing us 
perfectly, knowing us from the beginning, when Thou didst 
receive us, Thou still art saying to every one of us, " There- 
fore, come boldly to the throne of grace to obtain mercy and 
help in time of need." O Lover, O gentle and blessed 
Saviour, loving for evermore, shall we smite Thee ? shall we 
plait the thorns of our sins to crown Thee withal ? shall we by 
our transgressions pierce Thee ? Nay, Lord, hold us back, 
keep us from temptation, and teach us how more and more 
perfectly to love Thee, and to walk by the road of love, and 
to trust not our perfectness, not our faith, when we come to 
the royal gate of death, but to trust Thee ; for all our hope of 
salvation is not in our attainments but in Thy superabounding 
love. It is Thy generosity, it is the very nature of Thy being 
to help towards perfection those who are struggling with sin. 
From love we have had all nutriment of life ; Thy com- 
passions, Thy long-suffering, Thy gentleness have been our 
salvation ; and when we shall come to stand in Zion before 
God, then more than ever we shall know that it is the love of 
God, as made manifest in Jesus Christ, that has been our 
salvation ; and then with all angels and all redeemed saints, 
then and for ever and ever we will praise the Father, the Son, 
and the Spirit. Amen. Norwood, October 3. 



THOU art our God, our fathers' God, the God of our 
childhood, and every year and through all the ex- 
periences of life Thou hast still been our God, as much when 



Prayers. 291 

we turned our faces from Thee as when we sought Thee. 
Thou hast been the God of our recovery, Thou hast been our 
nurse ; Thou hast not been wearied with our weakness nor 
our naughtiness. More than any parent loves her babe Thou 
hast loved us and borne with us, and carried our sins and our 
sorrows, hid in Thine own heart's love, and still hast been 
drawing us ; and the more we loved Thee not, the more we 
needed Thy love and had it. Nor can we find among men 
any that can be likened unto Thee, long-suffering, forgiving 
iniquity, transgression and sin, whilst Thou art striving to lift 
us away from our sins and transgressions. We thank Thee, 
our God, that Thou wilt not by any means clear the guilty. 
Thou wilt not treat us as if sin and virtue were alike. Thou 
knowest that our whole eternity is in our purity and love, 
and in the power of the spiritual man, and Thou wilt not for 
our sake, neither for our cries nor tears nor smiles be other 
than faithful to us. Wretched is that child whose father and 
mother indulge it; wretched is that child that carries no 
chastisement, no restraint, for whom no one cares, for whom 
no one suffers : orphaned, indeed, is such a one. Dear Lord, 
we thank Thee that Thou wilt not clear us, and make the 
wrong seem as if it were right ; but with constant updrawing, 
with rebukes of love, with the chastisements of love, Thou 
art still persuading us to know our better way. By 
sorrow as >vell as by joy, by chastisement as well as by 
promise of love and of mercy, Thou hast followed us all 
the days of our lives, and by the grace of God we are 
what we are in all that is good and aspiring and pure. We 
thank Thee that we cannot enter into the full conception of 
Thy nature. There is not among men anything that justifies 
our thought of God. At the best, how far away are we from 
Thy nature ! We are as the moles that burrow under the 
ground, and the sun finds them in its heat, but they see 
nothing and know nothing. We rejoice, O God, that we see 
Thee as through a glass, darkly. Though Thou art to us 
often disfigured, yet we rejoice that there is the upgrowing ot 
Thy Spirit, that there is the kindling in us of something that 
cries out after Thee. And there are Thy servants that have come 
to hunger and thirst after righteousness ; and as the hart panteth 
after the water-brooks, there are those whose souls pant after 
Thee, O God. We thank Thee for every such intimation 
that we are of Thine own flock, and of Thine own heart's 



292 Prayers. 

flock. And now we pray, this morning, that Thou wilt 
take away from us all fear, all sense of discouragement, 
all repentance that shall prevent our looking up into 
Thy face. Give us, this morning, the liberty of children, 
even if they are disobedient, that have come home to 
Thee. Teach them of their ill way, and do not turn them 
away, nor shut the door upon them. Let Thy children come 
back to Thee, dear Lord ; help them, make the way easy 
to them, or else their feet would stumble, and they would 
utterly fall. In Thee is our help. We ruin ourselves, but 
Thou art our physician and recoverest our souls. Now accept 
our thanks for all Thy mercies past. We cannot mention 
them. One might sooner describe all that Thy sun every 
day illumines than make mention of Thy thoughts. How 
precious are they ! Grant that this morning, according to our 
several capacities, we may rise up into Thy presence, lay aside 
the earth and earthly things, and feel that we are sons of God 
for once, if it be but for the Sunday in the week, and that we 
may walk with glory and honour upon our heads ; foi though 
the world knows us not, before Thine eyes we are crowned 
and are going home. Our seat is prepared, our sceptre re- 
maineth, none shall occupy or take it from us ; come late, 
come early, we are waited for, and prepared for, thanks be to 
Thy name. Our steps are slow; Thine are fast for us, and 
such as may not walk of themselves Thou takest the lambs 
into Thine arms and earnest them. O Thou unwearying God, 
unslumbering watchman of Israel, eternal in love; and the 
power thereof, we glorify Thy name, and join with those that 
have been gathered out of the experiences manifold of this 
life and are in Thy presence to-day rejoicing with Thee ;. no 
longer in outward form of worship, no longer cribbed and con- 
fined, no longer through images, but they see Thee as Thou 
art. We, as we best can, imagine Thee. There among them 
are those that taught us something, themselves now more 
taught and better, of God. There are our little children ; they 
are not in the grave nor can they be, they are with Jesus. 
They heard Him say, though we did not, " Suffer little children 
to come unto Me ; " and behold they went, and we are left 
behind to weep and to sorrow, yet not as without hope. To- 
day they are blessed and our hearts find it easy ; they are as 
so many steps toward the throne, helping us to go up. There 
are our parents, there are our brothers and sisters, there are 



Prayers. 293 

the companions of our earlier years. Oh, how full is heaven 
of the joyful memories of love growing richer to us every day ! 
We would not desire to depart ; we would rebuke ourselves 
that we sometimes wish that it were over, and that the dim- 
ness of this life might come to the clear sight of the heavenly 
life. But we are willing to wait if it be Thy will, yea, in pain 
and imperfection still to work and do the best we may. But 
do not forget us too long, O Lord ; do not let us linger after 
we can serve Thee no more, but gather us then home. Grant 
Thy blessing to rest upon this waiting assembly. Thou knowest 
as they know not themselves. Hear not their prayer, but only 
listen to Thine own wishes respecting them. Yet let them 
cry out unto Thee for whatsoever they think they need, and 
answer Thou that which is best for them. As we do by our 
little children, so do Thou by us. We beseech of Thee, 
O Lord, that Thou wilt comfort those that are comfortless. Thou 
art nearest sometimes when we think Thee farthest off. When 
the blind that was restored was cast out of the synagogue, Thou 
didst find him, and Thou didst show mercy unto him then. 
Show mercy unto all those that feel that they are turned out 
from human sympathy, that they are overshadowed by mis- 
fortune, give them bravery of soul to endure the righteous 
will of God; whether in joy or in sorrow, in pain or in ease, 
give them patience to endure unto the end. Be with those 
parents that know not how to instruct their children, that are 
weighed down by a sense of responsibility, and since they have 
put themselves into the arms of Jesus, why should they not 
put their children there too, and trust in Him and rest 
in Him ? Be with those that are strangers far away from home 
and. home sick ; make this the House of God a home to 
them to-day, a place of refreshment in the wilderness. Grant 
Thy blessing to rest, we beseech of Thee, upon all those this 
day that are in perplexity of mind ; give them counsel — Thou 
that givest liberally and upbraidest not. And we beseech of 
Thee that Thou wilt give fortitude to those that are vehe- 
mently tried, and banish discouragement from any that are 
drooping and ready to sink down. Strengthen their hands, 
and so may they stand up and know that they are the 
sons of God, and be ashamed of cowardice and infidelity. 
Grant the blessing of Almighty God to rest upon Thy dear 
servant who here in this place teaches the people and feeds 
them with the bread of life. O, Lord, feed him more and 



294 Prayers. 

more, and may Jesus dwell in him, and may Christ and 
he be so identified that He shall preach Himself, " Christ, the 
hope of glory." And be with all the members of his church, 
and with the youth that are being brought up in the midst of 
this congregation. In all the services from day to day and 
from week to week of Thy servants at home or in the sanctuary 
be with them. Even as the light that guides but never 
oppresses, so lead Thy servant and this flock, we beseech of 
Thee, in green pastures and by the side of still waters. And 
now, Lord, what wait we for ? Thou knowest all that we ought 
to ask. Thou givest liberally and upbraidest not, even when 
our imperfect thought omits the things most weighty. Accept 
our services. We are ashamed to offer our love to Thee, so 
poor, so intermittent, so selfish ; and yet, when little children 
pluck rude flowers from the roadside and offer them to us, 
though they be not stately, nor fragrant, nor much beautiful, 
we take them because it is all that the little children know how 
to do. Take our offering and accept it because we are weak 
and ignorant and poor in every way, accept it for Thine own 
sake and perfume all these offerings with Thy love, and make 
them sweet and dear to Thyself, and to Thy name, Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit, shall be everlasting praise. Amen. 



LORD JESUS, when the mist hangs low and dark, and we 
cannot find our way, how good is the wind coming 
from the north that sweeps it all away, eats it up, drives it, and 
gives us again the light of the sun and the warmth thereof. In 
our errors, our misconceptions of Thee, we are blinded and go 
chilled and drooping ; fear is predominating and piety is a 
burden, and Thy service is a slavery and a bondage. What 
time the heavens clear and the sweet things of truth come 
blowing and letting us know the glory of God as made mani- 
fest in Jesus Christ ; what time we hear Him crying to us, 
" O, come, ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you 
rest ; " what time we hear Him saying, " They that are whole 
need not a physician but they that are sick ; I come not to call 
the righteous but sinners to repentance " — oh, are there any 
burdened consciences ? are there any souls sick of sinning ? 
are there any that mourn because they are so feeble in the 
royal way ? are there any that look upon their useless and com- 
fortless prayers ? are there any that fain would rejoice but 



Prayers. 295 

know not how ? Dear Lord, oh show them the heavens, and 
the fulness of Thy presence therein ; and may they not seek 
as if by their own strength and wisdom they could reach these 
altitudes of experience ; but, oh, may they lay their head upon 
the bosom of Jesus as Thy servant of old did, and, like John, 
learn to love and to trust, and to hope not in their goodness, but 
in the great power and glory and goodness of the love of God 
in Christ Jesus. Hear our petitions for Christ's sake. Amen. 

Harecourt Chapel, October 10. 

OTHOU Eternal God, Father, Son, and Spirit, shine 
forth this morning upon us that we may have the light 
of higher life, the light of Thy kingdom to interpret to us the 
darkness and the troubles of this mortal life. Give to us to 
behold not alone the golden thread of the past which led Thy 
people, but may we see in our history and in our time that 
there is a secret leading of God, and that darkness is covering 
the light, and that trouble is the bud of enjoyment, and that 
the fruits of righteousness while green are bitter, but when 
ripe are full of rejoicing and of mercy. May we learn how to 
live as seeing Him who is invisible ; may we make use of our 
senses for the lower necessities of life, but be not enslaved by 
them, nor judge all things higher by the feeble light of our 
lower life. Give us that faith that we can read an open 
vision, that we can discern therein the great number of the 
ransomed of the Lord that have returned and come to Zion 
with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads. Above all, 
help the great multitude of the redeemed to behold the 
Redeemer, and may everything that is in us cry for good, cry 
out for Him, the chief among ten thousand and altogether 
lovely. May there be in us this morning that from which our 
hearts spontaneously, unconsciously shall be calling Thee 
Father, Father, Father, so that we may feel that we have come 
home, and that we are not in the house made with hands but 
in the house of faith. Oh, grant that we may look up and. 
behold the invisible life, and that it may shine down with all 
sweet interpretations upon us, upon our mistakes, upon our 
sins, upon our grievous stumblings, upon our sorrows, upon 
our mourning and desponding. Grant that we may, though we 
have not received the promises, believe in them and be sure 
that they shall be interpreted, if not in our senses here, in the 
great land above. We pray for these gathered together this 



296 Prayers. 

morning to worship Thee, that they may have the illumination 
of Thy Spirit ; may they have full possession of that which is 
best in themselves ; may all doubt and fear that have clouded 
in their minds flee away ; may all deafness and insensibility 
find life throbbing within itself. Grant, we pray Thee, that 
those who have in the week been wearied by the necessities of 
temporal things, may find here peace; and as Thy servants 
went through the sea dry, this day may they be able, though 
the waves rise on either side, to walk in quiet and in rejoicing 
in the spirit of rest. Grant unto all these, we beseech Thee, 
that are burdened with trouble the power of casting their care 
upon Thee. Thou carest for them. Grant that those who are 
making vain complaints, and are speaking repiningly, and are 
seeking in restless prayers for they know not what— grant that 
the Spirit may intercede for them. They know not what to 
ask for as they should. May they have the assurance in them 
to-day that the Lord thinketh of them, that He is their guar- 
dian and their guide, and that He shall be their everlasting 
reward. Oh, that we may to-day be lifted so high that we can 
despise the world and all that it contains, that we may walk 
as the sons of God, conscious not of our own dignity, but con- 
scious of our elevation above all earthly things. Are there any 
that are steeped in sorrow ? Oh, release them from the dead 
body of the past, and give them the life that is now and is 
coming. Are there any in fresh sorrow, any who rock the 
empty cradle, who behold the couch robbed, who no longer 
have fellowship and sweet friendship, from whom have gone 
on and up those that have divided their life in days gone by ? 
We pray for parents bereaved of children, for children whose 
parents have gone away, for those that love from those 
beloved. In all this great land of darkness and sorrow Thou 
Consoler of the ages, Thou God of all mercy and consola- 
tion, draw near to them and rebuke their unbelief, irradiate 
their darkness, and give them something by which they can 
take hold of and climb into the land of rest. Oh, how sweet is 
the heaven above, full of joy ! and our children are there sing- 
ing, and our companions are there, no longer troubled with the 
wave or the wind. There are those with whom we have 
laboured through many a year. Oh, sacred Lamb of Peace, 
distil upon us to-day something of the dew of God's peace ; 
fill us all with hope and with joy. And grant, we beseech Thee, 
if there are strangers in our midst, that they may be at home 



Prayers. 297 

together with us in the house of the Lord, the home of the seek- 
ing, the separated, the solitary, those that yearn and have not. 
The Lord remember them and bless them to-day, the poor, 
those that feel the grief and the burden of ignominious poverty, 
those that are cast down, and overwhelmed ■ Lord, take them 
into Thy care, and give to them if not relief outwardly yet the 
relief of the soul in knowing that God careth for them. Though 
lonesome they are not alone ; though in great trouble they are 
not abandoned ; they are ever more in Thy presence. Thou 
thinkest of them. And we beseech of Thee that Thou wouldst 
grant upon the young the blessing of the sanctuary ; may they 
love manliness and abhor all that corrupts it. Give largeness 
to them and courage, we beseech of Thee. And remember 
the children, those that are yet in the arms, and those that are 
beginning their life, and those that are yet unripe : will the Lord 
take care of them and inspire their parents not to love them for 
luxury's sake, but for God's sake, and to rear them not for 
prosperity here, but for immortality there. Bless Thy servants 
that may be present who minister in sacred things, and grant 
that Christ may so dwell in them that they shall be able to 
preach Christ out of their own experience, out of their own 
souls. And as the bread is no longer bread which gives us 
strength, but has been developed into our own selves, so may 
the bread of life eaten, dissolved, distributed, fill all our body 
and all our souls. Bless Thy servant that stands appointed of 
Thee to make known the unsearchable riches of Christ to these 
people. We thank Thee for the greatness of the success that 
Thou hast given him in days gone-by : yet let him not be lifted 
up, give to him the spirit of humility, give to him the privilege 
of serving Christ in least things, yea, in obscurities, in things 
unknown, and more and more bring home the living Saviour 
to his consciousness that he may walk in the light of life as it 
comes from Jesus. Bless his household, bless the church of 
his charge, bless all its officers, and all its members, and may 
the Word of the Lord grow and prosper in the midst of this 
people. Remember all those that are round about striving to 
teach : may they cease to strive with each other, may they not 
provoke each other, nor sit in judgment upon each other ; but 
may they in the spirit of love bear each others burdens and 
seek to bless each other to edification. So may the spirit of 
gladness spread from church to church, bringing out at last the 
hidden light and the hidden truth and the hidden power of Thy 



298 Prayers. 

people. Eless us, we beseech Thee, in the further waiting 
upon Thee; and this morning accept our thanksgiving, give 
strength and grace to us. When life here is over may it blossom 
there, and in the renewed life and more glorious liberty, and in 
the full shining light of knowledge we will give the praise of 
our salvation to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. 
Amen. 



OLORD, Thou crowned Sufferer, teach us to suffer, teach 
us the hidden meaning of it, the purpose of it ; teach 
us in the spirit of Thy servant of old to desire that that which 
is lacking in the suffering of Jesus might be made manifest in 
our bodies. May we have an ambition not to suffer, but to be 
counted worthy to suffer ; for, " If we suffer with Him, we shall 
also reign with Him." Keep before us ever more the law of 
suffering, not the law of selfishness. And now bring balm 
through these thoughts to many a troubled soul, and clearness 
of vision to many that are perplexed in the way ; bring us near 
to the invisible God, that we may endure as seeing Him. When 
our short life is over, Oh, Thou Redeemer, do not forget us. 
Thou that hast never forgotten us in our life, Thou that hast 
chastised us as a father his child, do not let us be lost in the 
gloom of the sepulchre, nor lost in the way. No man can 
pluck us out of Thy hand, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth — nothing can take us from Thy 
hand of Divine love. Oh, Thou God of Love we love Thee, 
and yet how feebly, how poorly ! Bring up the summer in our 
experience, and may the garden of the Lord be filled with 
precious flowers and luscious fruits in our lives : we ask it for 
Thine own name's sake. Amen. 

City Temple, October 17. 



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